In today’s digital world, we lose touch of the basic elements of every day life.  Photographers like Erin Antognoli bring back us back to earth, with a craft that focuses on the simple life.  Her work is formed with a cheap Holga camera, and a heightened sense of her surrounding environments.  Instead of choosing to become engulfed with the many features carried with today’s digital cameras, she chooses to become engulfed with the many features in her subjects.

What makes her images even more fascinating, is the use of multiple exposures in a single frame.  Yes, it’s simple to do with today’s highly accessible, highly powerful photo editing software, such as Photoshop.  However, the photos carry a sense of spontaneity and freedom, purity and distortion, beautiful and dirty.  Erin has been featured in many art exhibits, and will be on display at the Block Rock Center for the Arts in Germantown, MD.

Excerpt from Artists Statement:

“After using my high tech cameras with little success, I decided to go back to basics and use a Holga camera to approach the task of making images in my city.  The camera itself is incredibly simple – plastic, very few controls, and prone to irregularity.  This method of making images placed much more of the emphasis on my own mind, for I have to decide what I want to say and how I want to make certain objects relate to each other, and then figure out how to translate that vision to film with minimal technical options.  This process inevitably forced me to become more intertwined with my own environment, for I am taking the time to look for objects and shapes and textures that strike me, and might compliment each other well when overlapped in a frame.  During all this, I found myself becoming more in tune to and comfortable with my surroundings while making my images.”

To learn more about Erin Antognoli, visit: www.eantognoli.com