Insight / Onsite

Photography by Nicholas DeLeo Taken on medium format film Sizes variable from negatives

In my images one will find themself immersed in a seemingly chaotic space of dots and lines all created at night around busy intersections. Our world at night lends itself to the camera, allowing me to show aspects of it that are imperceptible to the naked eye and evident only when the film develops. The conversation that happens between the photograph and photographed creates a fascinating tension.

The black and white darkroom echoes the environment in which my images are created. Both of these places, the darkroom, and the intersections, have a darkness to them. I use the light at the intersections to create a chemical reaction on the film, the latent image, and l use light in the darkroom to create a chemical reaction on the paper, the print itself. The frame, Three Quarters in Time, is divided into quarters, shows light trails unbound by a rigid composition. When I make these images, I set the boundaries of my frame and use the lights around me as points of reference with my camera as the drawing instrument. I work with a tripod, chemicals, and intentional camera movements.

The controlled yet fundamentally chaotic world that we live in is wildly fascinating to me. Photography interests me due to its inherently deceitful nature; a photograph is dishonest to its viewer. A photograph is a representation of what is in front of the camera, yet it is not a truth of fact. In my images, I explore this property of photography by intervening with the seamless whole, thus the photographic frame represents our chaotic world.

The camera, performative as it is in my hands, lets me translate the chaos of our world into an uncanny image that would never be visible to our eyes alone.