About

http://www.elisadecker.org/

My original training was in drawing and painting, but over the years I have moved into photography. Looking through a photographer’s lens with a painter’s eye, I explore making images that do things usually done by paintings. These images grow out of the urban landscape I live and work in. This is ironic since I am not really an urban photographer at heart. But because of where I live, I am often straining to find the natural world breaking out of the artificial urban environment.

The tipping point in my transition from a painter to a photographer came during a 2005 residency at the Camargo Foundation, I explored Cassis and the Calanques on foot, both by myself and with a group of local hikers. Upon returning to New York, Pfizer gave me a solo exhibition of photographs taken during that residency.

Two decades later I am still deeply immersed in photography, taking photographs that are very much informed by my background as a painter.  I love being in the moment with my subject, and I get that from photography as much as I used to from plein air painting.

A recurrent theme involves returning to the same subject over a period of time. I look for the flux inherent in the fixed, echoing an earlier series of daily photographs taken over several years.  In that series I documented the flow of time through Hudson River Park from the same vantage point each morning.

This meditation on the intangible passage of time continues to absorb my attention as I continue to look out from my perch and follow the phases of the moon, along with changes in light and atmosphere over the Hudson River.