Featured Photographer: Kyle Lang's Series "Manifest Content"
Kyle Lang is a New Jersey-based fine art and landscape photographer whose work draws inspiration from the simple complexity of photography itself. To Lang, “Photography is a unique medium because, unlike other visual arts, it records something that has in fact existed. It’s not an interpretation of that thing, but an evidential impression of it. On the other hand, photography also fails to accurately document something as entirely true since it cannot capture situations surrounding the photograph. It has its limits.”
Lang embraces these contradicting viewpoints in his new series Manifest Content, a darkroom photography project that delves into themes of time, memory, dreams, subconsciousness, and the environment we find ourselves in, both while awake and asleep. Inspired from early childhood experiences of intense nightmares that left him covered in sweat and tears from the confusion of where he has just been, he began to document his experiences in a dream journal. As he grew older he soon began to realize that the once uncontrollable was conquerable and began to practice lucid dreaming and reclaimed the nights that were once lost. Though these experiences decreased with age, they left a lasting impression on the artist that he has taken as strengths in his artistic journey.
Manifest Content began in the same place his inspiration did: in his bedroom. The concept of creating a photographic dream journal had been on his mind and in practice in many forms before he came upon his final concept. Just like the eventual overcoming of his nightmares, it took time and dedication to finally realize the direction he was trying to go in. He shared with us that his “…current view of photography came about when I used photography as a means to make sense of recurring dreams I would have. I made a journal to help me keep track of them, then I began to draw them, and eventually took inspiration from them to create photographs. This idea of recreating dreams through photos introduced me to a new way of seeing the medium. The resulting prints from this exercise didn’t make logical sense but were they not documentational to some degree? They are, after all, photographs.”
His first draft of Manifest Content was built on experimenting with ruined negatives, using the random impurities to create a feeling of losing the memory of a dream. His second draft revolved around utilizing infrared film, combing dark images and infrared photographs, but felt the ideas he had were not coming out as strongly as desired. In frustration, he laid out all of his materials on his bedroom floor: ripped apart photographs collages and montaged together, miscellaneous items from around my room, and some journal entries, playing and rearranging them in an inspired state. It finally clicked when he placed a boar jaw (he has a skill collection, yeah it’s weird), on a print of a frozen waterfall, it fit perfectly. The next day he went into the darkroom, made a lousy (but effective) mask, and made his first photomontage of teeth in a frozen waterfall.
Lang’s sudden clarity couldn’t have happened at a better time. It was during the same period that he decided to haphazardly apply for the 2020 grant from the Thomas George Artist Fund, a grant intended for painters. He knew he wasn’t a painter, but he was painting with light, right? So he submitted his application anyways with the first three photo-montage light-painted images that he had completed. Within his application, he promised that he would take a road trip across the United States to experiment with his series further, dream journal in hand. To his surprise, his humble submission caught the juror’s attention and he was awarded the grant! But also the obligation to get in his van and travel!
As the artist traveled from state to state in his van with an ever-growing amount of 35mm and 120 film negatives of landscapes and journal entries, his series began to take shape. He would write down his dreams in the moments after waking in each new location and draw what he could remember. Eventually, he began to create photographs based on the emotional content of the dream, instead of the visuals themselves. As his body of work grew, each translation of the preceding dream was different from the last; however, the emotional aspect of the image remained the same. As the process of journaling and photographing continued, he found myself unintentionally creating pieces that showed a personal relationship to the environments in which he was shooting. He shared with us that, “The act of storing and recalling a memory through images is what drives my creative process and working in an analog medium forces me to do this. There is a length of time that elapses between when the shutter is released when the image is seen, and when it is printed. Hindsight is created between shooting and viewing the image, which changes the perception of the memory it recalls.”
Now in 2021, Lang’s connection to the images he captured is being reshaped as he develops the 200+ rolls and sheets of film he made on his year-long journey through the United States. Just like his dreams are realized after waking, the photomontages he creates in the darkroom allow him to discover multi-faceted representations of reality that connect the artist’s experiences on the road with his own subconscious. He discussed his methods for the final creation of his pieces: “When making a print, I utilize the inherently dark qualities of the darkroom. While in this visually understimulating environment, I feel as though I enter a limbo between dream and reality allowing easier communication between subconscious and paper. I pick multiple negatives and set them up in different enlargers. Then I begin printing with past and present influences. The resulting print acts as a memento from my time in this semi-subconscious state, something that can be held and shared. The tangibility makes them feel like personal objects, but they also act as subliminal messages to be deciphered often revealing something about myself and my ties to the photographs.”
The best news about Lang's series is that it isn't close to being finished. He was recently awarded an artist residency at TYPA, a historic print and paper museum in Tartu, Estonia, where he just relocated to in April of 2021. It is here that he will continue working on Manifest Content. We are excited to see more of his surreal work taken from his subconscious in the future. We wish you the best of luck Kyle and make the most of your residency!
GALLERY
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kyle Lang is a photographer from New Jersey. His obsession with travel and exploration originated from his family's annual camping trips for week-long spans in rural Pennsylvania. During these trips, his father would take him on hikes, educating him on animal tracks and the small wildlife that they would encounter. These experiences formulated his current artistic inspiration through environmentally-centric photography.
He began formal photography studies in 2014. In 2015 he took up a job as a Nikon Representative where he taught photography. One year later he left the country to reorient his goals and find himself a new backdrop to work with. While abroad, Lang had the time and content he needed to explore the intersection between himself and his environment. Feeling satisfied with the experience, he resumed his studies with a new lens. He received his Associate in Fine Arts in 2020.
Lang is best known for his medium format landscape photography from his time spent traveling. To name a few accomplishments, his work has been showcased in a variety of galleries including the Otago Museum in New Zealand, The Halide Project in Philadelphia Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania Center of Photography in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. He was the featured environmental artist on “The Earth Issue” in 2019, and his photograph of the Aurora Australis was featured in Analog Forever Magazine’s “Heart of the Issue” in 2019.
His work is now expanding past landscape photography and moving onto more conceptual work that focuses on bridging a gap between surrealism and documentary photography. In 2020 Lang was awarded the Thomas George Artist Grant which funded his cross-country trip to work on Manifest Content, a surrealist darkroom photography project. He was awarded an artist residency at TYPA, a historic print and paper museum in Tartu, Estonia. In April of 2021 he will be relocating to Estonia to continue working on Manifest Content.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Behlen is an instant film addict and the founder and publisher of Analog Forever Magazine. For the last 6 years, Behlen has become an obsessive community organizer in the film photography world, including launching the independent publishing projects PRYME Magazine and PRYME Editions, two enterprises dedicated to the art of instant film. Through these endeavors, he has featured and published 200+ artists from around the globe via his print and online publications.
He has self-published two Polaroid photobooks -“Searching for Stillness, Vol. 1” and “I Was a Pioneer,” literally a boxed set of his instant film work. His latest book, Searching for Stillness Vol II was published in 2020 by Static Age. He has been published, been interviewed, and been reviewed in a quantity of magazines and online publications, from F-Stop and Blur Magazine to the Analog Talk Podcast. He loves the magic sensuality of instant film: its saturated, surreal colors; the unpredictability of the medium; it’s addictive qualities as you watch it develop. He spends his time shooting instant film and backpacking in the California wilderness, usually a combination of the two.
Connect with Michael Behlen on his Website and on Instagram!
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