CORNERS OF ROOMS

These images are photographs taken in rooms found where light could be seen, felt, and transformed as it fell onto walls. They depict intersections of walls, in most cases two walls and a ceiling. I am interested in retrieving space, grasping it out of the world, isolating it, and letting it achieve a life of its own. I have chosen these corners to photograph because they transform for the viewer an innocuous, "dead", unused space into an area pure and free of distraction. I have removed and isolated the corners from any other parts of the rooms in which they were photographed in order to provide a clear space for light to wrap around and define.
The images' contextual ambiguity encourages the reading of volume, shape, and time to be flexible and elastic. I am interested not in representing space, but in creating the experience of space. The corners transform their existence as parts of rooms into the possibility of the acceptance of time brought about simply by light itself. The walls become a record of light, and our experience of the images becomes a confluence of time, bringing the corners into a state very different than what they seem to be in reality. But for me the tension in this work lies in the idea that in the end they can still read as what they are: corners of rooms.
These prints are generated through entirely traditional color photography processes. My intention is to break down all barriers to the image, presenting it in its most clear and pure form.

MORGAN COHEN
2001