Anouk Ines ‘From One Moment to Another’

The images in the series “From One Moment To Another,” offer a complex weave of colors and rhythm, a dialogue between chaos and calm set to a fleeting, fickle and momentarily fierce breeze. These are original images with no after the fact manipulation, overprinting or layering; only raw energy cooled off on fragile soft mat paper. They literally illustrate a split second in the hazy stroll of time as life sprints by.

From Monet to the so-called Post Internet movement, photography has informed painting and painting has likewise influenced photography. If it could be possible to reverse the relationship between the two, where is the camera’s position to the brush? In her seminal work “On Photography,” Susan Sontag offered her observation that “The painter constructs,” while “the photographer discloses.” If a photographer treats her camera like a brush, can she do both? Can photography paint with light and without long exposure? These are questions that come up in the striking series by Anouk Ines. Having spent decades refining her trade as a photographer, Ines takes a painterly approach to framing the anxiety of loss and connection familiar to so many of us. Meaning builds from emotional experience that challenges physical reality. There is also action and the realization of image through gesture. Hand movements, not digital post-production, call attention to the process of creating. It was a process of isolation, silence and introspection. Before building her images, the artist stayed for alone in the woods for several days, returning to primal impulses to approach an uncluttered state of mind. Not a heroic journey, but a healthy one that provides a momentarily clear perspective.

When photographers paint with light, this tends to mean using long exposure. Ines takes a more immediate approach, treating the camera as if it were a brush lingering on the overlap before jumping from one moment to another. This perpetual movement appears as a metaphor for the gap between the perspective of a phenomenon and the phenomenon itself. “A photograph never comes out as you expect or intend. It’s always just slightly different due to technology, technique, environment, the unforeseen, etc. Outside of the studio, surroundings are something you can’t control. You can only control yourself.”

Anouk Ines is an art academy graduate and mother of two children. After graduating from school, she has continued to make, but not exhibit art. Decades later, this is her first public exhibition.