Something to Hold Onto

http://tucsoncitizen.com/art/2010/03/22/new-diana-yakowitz-photography-exhibition-at-kuzu-friday/

Diana Yakowitz

Artist Statement

When I was a child, I opened the back of my first camera and exposed all of the film. That unforgiving experience made me look upon equipment as something to avoid, overcome, put up with, pull one over on, cheat, use, abuse, circumvent, and then finally befriend. Since that first learning experience, my photographic works have been the result of an interior journey through the seventies, influenced by the sixties, honed in the eighties, on pause in the nineties, and with many forks and dead ends in the ‘roads’ leading up to today. I shoot few frames and often wait for some recognition to occur. I study my images afterwards and often discover something that influences my work latter or an overlooked image, such as Flagging Garden, that I see as if with new eyes now. I want my work to be more than just recording the visible. More than shades and shapes, I hope they make visible a little of myself and that interior journey I have been on.

The images I chose for this show were taken in the past year with a few exceptions. And with two exceptions, Reaching Out and LA Shroud, all are from the Pacific Northwest. All have in common some degree of human interaction or intrusion on nature. In searching for an overall title for the show, I kept coming back to one image that I had titled “Something to Hold Onto.” For me, it expressed frustration and longing laid bare. I found the title fit not only this image, but the entire show with all illustrating, sometimes subtly, this expression in a literal or metaphoric way. In fact, I can’t think of a better expression for my relationship with photography itself.