~ by K.P. Henley
As a photographer, Lauren has an amazing eye. Everywhere she travels she brings a mini camera, and to that camera she attributes the depth and breadth of her photography.
But don’t let her fool you; it is in fact her magic eye which sees the story each time she blinks, the weird and wonderful in the everyday world. The story may be an enigmatic one, in fact sometimes the viewer has a choice of stories, and a different one emerges each time your eye falls on a picture. Her imagery reflects the poems she has written and read, the drawings she has penned, and the music she has loved as well.
She titled her last exhibition The Paradox of Seeing. Martyn Lee, her curator, remarks: “This suggests to me ambiguity, significance, maybe symbolism, tension-harmony between culture and nature, deeper forces underlying our world. In short, photographs that are pregnant with meaning, even if the viewer doesn’t know what that meaning might be; it’s simply the hint of something deeper and more profound than the basic simplicity of her images.”
Her vision, I think, could be attributed to the multiplicity of cultures that she has absorbed in her peripatetic life. Not just the ethnic or geographic ones, Czech, American, Jewish, Hawaiian, Californian, Canadian, urban, rural, mountain, etc. There is also the intellectual culture, the artist’s culture, “geek” culture, hippie culture, carnie culture, street culture, various musical cultures, a broad range of natural and holistic medical apperceptions, the culture of the entrepreneur and the networker, and more and more and more.
But who is she? Lauren is hard to describe. Eccentric, empathetic, eclectic. There is a magic about her, strangers smile at her, dogs piddle at her feet and to children (young and old) she is something of a Pied Piper. She makes you believe in rainbows, if not in fairies and tree goddesses. But the best way to learn her is to look through her eyes at the photos she presents here.
What I love about yours is the simplicity and the intimacy. You have an eye for the obscure and have a way of turning the banal into something interesting and pleasing. You learn to view the world more intimately through the lens, I feel, and your eye tends to train in on things that others mostly just don't see. Go for more walks :)
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