Tony Ragusea

JCAM: What is your professional name?

TR: The full name printed on my business card is Anthony Ragusea, PsyD, MSCP, ABPP. My day job as a psychologist helps support my photography habit.

JCAM: Where were you born and does that place still influence you?

TR: I was born in Waco, Texas, USA, but my parents moved to Pennsylvania when I was a toddler so I have no memories of it and it’s not even an indirect influence on me.

JCAM: Where do you live now and how does that place influence you?

TR: I live in Lewisburg now, which is a small, historic town in rural central Pennsylvania, USA. I grew up in Pennsylvania so this area is a large part of my life experience, but I do not think of it as having much of an influence on me (though I am probably wrong.) I take a lot of photos of the area because it is what is most available as a subject, just as I have in other places I have lived in my life. But I adapt to what the location offers no matter where I am. For example, in Pennsylvania there are lots of wide open spaces and rolling hills, giving me a lot of room to experiment with kites. When I lived in Florida, I focused more on water and clouds because those were the dominant features.

JCAM: Do you have family, friends, or fellow artists who support you in your work, life and art making and how do they make a difference in your life?

TR: My family has always supported my artistic endeavors. We are a moderately creative family so it is a part of the family culture. My father was an actor when he was young, my brother, Adam, was an accomplished composer, now he is a chef and YouTube star. My wife, Lynne, has had a number of artistic interests including making glass beads. My mother was an artist her whole life and a grade school art teacher. I think I get most of my artistic sensibilities from her. She is an eclectic and she tends toward the more abstract and stylized than the realistic.

JCAM: When and how did you start making art?

TR: I became interested in photography as a teenager, and I grew up during the transition period between film and digital. I had my own dark room for a few years but I also wanted to master the new digital tools like Photoshop, which I did learn to some degree in college. My bachelor’s degree is in Film/Video from Penn State, class of 2000. After college I did not have the money to invest in the software and hardware tools that at the time were extremely expensive and still in the early stages of refinement. So between those obstacles and my decision to go to grad school to study clinical psychology — I earned my PsyD from Wright State University in 2005 — I gave up on art for a long time. I only returned to it recently, and returned to a totally different ecosystem. Not only did I have some more money to invest in the tools I needed, but I started to really appreciate how much had changed since the late 1990s.

Computer hardware is finally fast and affordable enough to keep up with programs like Photoshop, and Photoshop, Lightroom, and other photographic/video tools are now far more sophisticated and responsive. The quality of digital camera images is far beyond what it used to be, and storage space is cheap enough to make working with large files practical for the non-professional. Even my phone has more capability than you could get with $5000 back in the 90’s. So I found that I could create much more efficiently, and that gave me the freedom to try ideas that a couple of decades ago would have just been too difficult.

JCAM: Can you describe the time when you first realized that creating was something you absolutely had to do?

TR: I would say the first time I made my own photographic prints. I loved how both magical and scientific it was at the same time. I was attracted not only to the creative potential, the ability to make remarkable images, but also understanding all the science that goes into making those images possible. I liked exploring how changing one factor, like an aperture size or a chemical dilution, would affect the image, sometimes in strange or distorted ways but in ways that were understandable and largely reproducible.

In retrospect I realize how therapeutic photography was for me as a teenager — I struggled with depression and at times dissociation. But a camera requires you to pay attention to the real world, to stay connected and present. You really can not be lost in your head while trying to compose a shot and pay attention to all your settings at the same time, and I found that very helpful.

JCAM: Why do you make art now?

TR: I make art now not because it is therapeutic, but because it is fun and challenging. Creativity and problem solving are required, and at the end I (hopefully) have a product I am proud of. And just as I was as a teenager, I am still motivated by the question: What happens if I do this?

JCAM: How has your work changed or developed over time?

TR: I have always been more focused on landscape and nature photography than human subjects. And while I still take conventional nature shots, lately I have been shifting more toward experimentation and abstraction. It started because I was doing nature photography at night, and I was doing that because I have a day job, a house, and a family, and night time was the only time I had free to go make art. I started learning about light painting and how to take long exposures of moving light, like fireflies and stars.

Then I had a moment of inspiration one night when we were camping and my family was playing around with a string of LED lights. I took a long exposure to see what it would look like and I was really impressed by how bright and fun the image was. There was no person, just swooshing lines of color. So I had the obvious next thought, What else can I stick lights to that moves? And that is when I thought to combine my photo hobby with another hobby of mine: stunt kites! I have been a stunt kite flyer for decades, and I started to experiment with what I could achieve with LED lights and long exposures. That led to more lights, brighter lights, bolder flight patterns, and more complex layering and adjustments in Photoshop.

I do not fly kites much over the winter, so most recently I have been exploring the possibilities of slit scan photography using just my phone. Again, it is about abstraction and experimentation, but it is also about working creatively with boundaries. Whether it is shooting in the dark, kites with lights, or slit scan software, I have an environment, a tool or a set of tools that I have to work with, and I like to see what creative options there are within the restrictions of that environment or tool.

Some people do not like software because they think it is cheating or fake. But I see software as no different than a paint brush or a potting wheel: it is a tool with a limited range of functions and abilities, and my job as the artist is to see what I can accomplish using the tools I have at my disposal. Jon Stewart used to have a similar sort of philosophy when he was running The Daily Show. Rather than let his correspondents run loose and do whatever they felt inspired to do, he would give them restrictions, rules, deadlines, and he found he got a much higher quality product as a result.

JCAM: What are you trying to communicate with your art?

TR: Nothing in particular. Even so, I mean, I do have a skill set in high-minded art criticism that comes from college, but the work I do now is all about pretty colors, interesting shapes, and striking compositions. Art is my fun time, and if it is interesting to other people as well then that makes me feel good, too.

I remember a long time ago going to a talk given by Andres Serrano. Some people thought his photographs of bodily fluids mixed with religious iconography were meant to be intentionally political or at least had an explicit message. That certainly seemed obvious to me. What struck me was how he explained that his most scandalous photos had no message of any kind, and came about purely because he was interested in how different bodily fluids looked under different conditions, including with objects, and the objects he chose were because of their appearance only and what they contributed to the aesthetics of the final composition.

He seemed surprised how anyone could think otherwise. Regardless of his true intentions, I appreciated his unapologetic defense of aesthetics for aesthetics sake. I realized that simple experimentation with light and medium and subject without any deeper agenda or message could lead to art that was just as interesting or provocative — as worthy as art inspired by deep thought or feeling. He and I seemed motivated by the same question: What happens if I do this? And more so the question: What do I want to say?

As a psychologist, you learn that it is not the thing, or the experience, or the intent that matters. It is the meaning we make of it that matters — whatever it is. And in that sense we make our own reality. It just so happens that people generally make the same meaning from the same sensory information, so reality feels like a shared experience. Art is the same. And so while the artist’s intent is always worth considering, ultimately it is subjective meaning-making that will rule the day and decide what is being communicated.

JCAM: Do you have any creative patterns, routines or rituals associated with your art making?

TR: Not really, mainly I just try to keep my eye out for interesting textures, colors, subjects, and locations. When I find something that catches me I try to think out what I would need to do to make this subject an interesting photograph in a way that seems new or creative (e.g., what lighting conditions, composition, depth of field, length of exposure, or other techniques). I might ask myself: What is it about this subject that intrigues me most? How do I emphasize that element best? What element(s) of this subject can I alter, isolate, or manipulate to make it seem more abstract or surreal? How do I take something ordinary and make it seem perplexing or novel?

JCAM: What element(s) of art making do you enjoy the most and why?

TR: With photography, it is always about what I call the big reveal. Unlike most art which is typically created slowly, photography has an instant moment where you get to see what you created. Setting up or refining that image may take hours. But you will have a good sense for whether you have a quality image or not the first time you look at it on a screen. And that is always fun.

JCAM: What are the art making tools you use now?

TR: With my kite pictures, I use a Canon M6 Mark II on a tripod. I set it to continuously take 30-second long exposures while I fly a kite that is mounted with various versions of LED lights, usually powered by a small Li-ion battery taped to the kite. I process the photos in Photoshop and sometimes use other software to help remove low-light noise or refine light trails. And I choose a few exposures that seem to fit well together compositionally and then blend them in various ways. I made a couple of videos for YouTube to demonstrate the process.

With my slit scan photos, I am actually only using my phone. There are a few apps out there. The one I use is called ScanCamera for iOS. Subjects rotate on a turntable to create the twisting effect, but the subject, the rate and direction of rotation, the angle of the camera in relation to the subject, certain parameters of the scan itself, and the lighting can all be manipulated to create different effects.

JCAM: What interesting project are you working on at the moment?

TR: My goal for this winter is to create some kite compositions in the snow. That is a big project and a lot of things have to work out. There needs to be snow — increasingly rare with global warming. There needs to be the right amount of wind. The temperature has to be cold — but not so cold that at night I can not expose my hands — because working with the kite and camera requires fine dexterity at points. And I have to have enough time and energy to put myself through all that on a dark winter night! I am not sure if it will happen or if it is even worth it. But I am curious what it would look like with lights reflecting off the snow Once the pandemic is controlled and it is safer to travel, I would like to go around the country and do kite compositions in more varied locales with different backdrops.

Contact information:

Email: tony@ragusea.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tony.ragusea

Instagram: @artbyragusea website: https://ragusea.weebly.com

Blue Stunt Kite

Digital Photograph

Graphic Kite

Digital Photograph