James R. Lane
Artist Bio
I have spent over four decades pursuing the ability to place light on a piece of paper. The magic of the moment when the Polaroid image emerged out of the “brown-ness” has never left me. I spent countless hours, maybe even years, in the perpetual darkness of my family’s darkroom trying to recapture and expand on that magic. The holding of my breath as the image emerged out of the developer usually ended in a sigh of disappointment as I didn’t quite capture the light in the way my mind’s eye saw it.
I have always been an early adopter of new technology or rather – an early modifier of technology. When Sony released the first digital camera that captured “light” on a charge-coupled device and then stored it on floppy disks, I bought the camera thinking that my failing as an artist was a limitation of the tools; and now technology has surmounted that obstacle. But the images produced by this new digital technology lacked the vibrancy of even my early attempts in the darkroom. The sigh that escaped my lips on seeing the print coming out of the inkjet printer was not a whole lot different, either.
My search for light didn’t end there. Major advances were made in digital cameras, inkjet printers, photo manipulation software, and even the paper that images were printed on. And with each advance, my sighs of disappointment became a little less pronounced, until I realized that technology was never going to provide the answer, it was only going to provide a wider path toward the light.