SHADOW and LIGHT: Darkroom Edition

Fernando Luna is a Toronto-based filmmaker and photographer who explores narrative and storytelling using experimentation to question our perceptions of reality.

Photographs are stories that we capture. They are composed of the same elements: actions, passions, light, and darkness. Oftentimes it is an instinctive process where we serve simply as a medium—yet, unlike traditional stories, these require no words to connect us to one another. My time in the darkroom taught me that a picture only truly comes to life in the print. There is a craft in that physical process that makes the work personal in a way a digital file never can be.

Hadi Amtaeleq is Saudi Canadian photographer whose work examines concepts of self-existence and expression, and how we, as a pluralistic society, reshape our identities to find our place in it.

When I look through the viewfinder, my thoughts drift between the technical nature of analog photography and the emotional response to the subject or scene I encounter; the camera acts as a tool that blurs these lines. In this darkroom series, my work focuses on using manipulated light and shadows as the stage to narrate how our striving for uniqueness would often lead to inner conflict, and the metamorphosis we undergo to achieve self-acceptance.

Karina Feng is a Toronto-based photographer and storyteller whose work explores human emotion and passion through the female gaze.

A person’s essence lives in fleeting moments: a smile, a glance, a transient encounter. Through photography, these ephemeral fragments are suspended and preserved. Light and darkness define one another to present compositions that will never occur in the same way. The alchemy of analog processes extends these evanescent experiences, capturing a feeling just beyond the limits of perception, and inviting viewers to linger within a moment in time.

Samuel Lui is a Toronto-based artist. He explores how interruptions of image making through analogue processes inform our identity, and the rediscovery of self through the dialogue between still photography and moving images.

Dreams whisper to us in the darkest hours, as lines, shapes and forms emerge from shadows into the light. The invisible hand that bends our dreams to its will. Where does it come from? From the deep well of our subconscious? From the restless souls of old that haunt the photographic medium? From the process itself? I believe its true source lies in the communities that foster our creativity. We do not only dream for ourselves; we dream for one another. To my fellow artists and models who share this show and to the Hart House community — thank you for your generosity and for the collective dream that we share. In this exhibition, I invite you into mine.

Sanjana Iyer is an artist constantly at loggerheads with reality, trying to find an equilibrium between changing their perception to fit the world and changing the world to fit their ideas.

There is something recalcitrant about capturing something in motion in a still frame. In the absence of colour, the eye must rely on other cues to guide its movement - shape, structure, light & shadow. In the rein of these tools, to defamiliarise the viewer with the image, lies the heart of black and white photography to me. Through this series, they aim to represent this struggle for equilibrium between an honest expression of reality and their defamiliarised, contorted vision.