David Fokos (Born in 1960) was born in Baltimore, MD. He’s a world-renowned artist who has been photographing the landscape for more than 30 years. He currently lives in San Diego, CA. Using an 8 by 10 view 85-year old camera, he often works for 100 hours or more to come up with a single image. Fokos’ stylish black-and-white images have been praised as works of genius of minimalism. Fokos is represented by 14 galleries on 3 continents. His work can be found in many corporate and private collections and in many museums. With his work, he’s not trying to show the viewer what the places he captures look like, but rather what they feel like. Of his work he says that the images he makes today are the result of decades of exploration and discovery in his quest to understand how humans experience the world.
His goal is to express the essence of his experience – evoking within the viewer the same emotions he felt when making the images. Drawing upon the several years of his interest in Japanese aesthetic traditions and his scientific background in engineering, he came to understand that, because humans’ emotional responses are based in time, if he wants to express the emotion he felt at the time the photograph was made, he must also encode the element of time within the image. Through the use of long exposures Fokos has been able to encode the element of time into what would otherwise be a static image. In this process he strips away the “visual noise” to reveal a world that is not experienced visually.
