Jeanne Wells - Footless Angel - 7.5 x 6 on 9.5 x 13 - bleached hand applied emulsion on watercolor paper - $125

I bear witness; I am my camera. I want to show you the world as I know it: broken or whole, rebuilding, appearing, disappearing . . . Before I was a photographer, I was a poet, and as time passed I found my poems growing smaller and smaller, less dependent upon narrative and more dependent upon the vertical story of the lyric -- and then one day I put down the pen and took up the camera. I am not so interested in a photography which shows the viewer what we see – but rather how we see. Imperfection, perfection, tiny detail. Any harmony is momentary, any strife soon left behind. Rather than the conceptual, I choose the organic, the intuitive, the concrete objects of the world around me as they present themselves. Perhaps as a reaction to the easy perfection of new technologies, or perhaps because of the expanded potential for the work to evolve and morph and find its own voice as I go along, I have returned to very basic methods. Big cameras, film, plates. Grinding chemicals, mixing them by hand, flowing emulsions and applying pigments with brushes. The perfection I seek is an emotional perfection rather than technical perfection, constantly changing and asking to be redefined. I hope that you enjoy my work. Each print or plate is, I hope, an expression of gratitude, for beauties always threatening to pass beyond expression. Jeanne Wells Turner, Maine 2013