It’s all right there in front of our eyes: the observable, the visible, the discernable. And this latest body of photographic work by John Opera presents itself in the summative mode as “The Observers”—even while the title calls us to attention about our fraught status as those who look, perceive, and otherwise constitute reality by means of a visual sensibility. We came, we saw, and yet...we missed things?
For as overt and obvious as photographs can often be (in the everyday sense, “we see what’s in the picture”), there's so much that can be missed—if looked over, then also overlooked. You’ll notice, then, the several categories at hand, roughly speaking: some suns (or are they moons? perhaps something else altogether?); a gathering of palm fronds and cacti; portraits of (disaffected? distracted?) young people; and lastly, a bunch of dynamically colored abstractions (along with black-and-white ones for good measure), which Opera names “diffraction photographs.” Still, the quick taxonomy undersells both the nature and achievements of the individuals groups—and perhaps even more saliently, entirely bypasses the way these clusters alter our understanding of one another; we have noticed, thus far, nothing about their interactivity. Why is this constellation of subjects presented simultaneously, in a shared space—in a word, how do these photographs hang together? If observers are meant to look, there is on this occasion, more to meet than first introduced to the eye.
Technically, there is a book’s worth of information to convey. Opera’s studio practice is a medieval den of invention—animated, as he is—by a devotion to the principles of physics, Newtonian and quantum (light, after all, is a guiding function for this strain of science) and photography (an art made in the service of physics and its companion, chemistry). That said, let’s stay topical, not technical—address the surface of things. We will slow down and describe what we see, leaving aside all that is unseen, which nevertheless underwrites these images: what they are, how they were created.
Read the full exhibition essay, The Observers, by David LaRocca here.
View a video walkthrough of John Opera's studio here.
View a video walkthrough of the John Opera's Chicago exhibition here.