Ethan G. Salwen

Contrary to what this image and my latests posts might have you think, I am hardly a fine-arts oriented person, and certainly not in regard to photography. Nonetheless, as I was playing with the last posts, my screen overfilling with random video snapshots, I couldn’t help but fancy this composition. It seemed to speak very well to the lengthy conversations I have been having with Andrew Matusik, a young, highly driven, impressively successful commercial photographer. He is a total new-era photographay techno geek, yet he absolutely retains much the artistic sentiments that drove him to study fine art painting at Occidental College, long before he turned to photography.

One thing that Matusik and I talked about as I gathered information for a series of three articles I am writing about him is photographic collage that he recently constructed for GenLux Magazine. The piece — comprising more than 100 images and more than 120 Photoshop layers — is based on Matusik’s MC-Escher-esque photographic interpetation of a vision from his own dreamscape. I don’t recall my own dreams too often, but looking at my screen just now and seeing this same woman on the same bus, looking at herself, staring at the viewer, quitely passive but in a world of visual movement created by the juxtiposition of images, well, I just couldn’t help but hit “Apple + Shift + 4″ and grab this image. Captured from a computer monitor at a mere 72 dpi, this photograph (if that’s the right term) would  never pass technical muster for a standard print publication. But you can see it just fine, no?