PHOTO BY PARKER STEVENSON

 

Christy Lee Rogers, a self-taught photographer, indulges in her obsession of water as a medium for breaking the conventions of contemporary photography. With light refraction as the technical foundation for her work, Rogers utilizes this phenomenon of light as it passes from the air, which has a lower optical density, into water, with a higher optical density, to capture in-camera images, without post-production manipulation. Rogers grew up in a family of musicians in the small beach town of Kailua, Hawaii on Oahu’s windward coast. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California and Kailua, Hawaii.

Duncan Beebe, Eyemazing Magazine
“Her work is undeniably contemporary yet also timeless; portions appear to be drawn from the Baroque period, where dynamic movement and overt emotion were at their height.  Many have likened her work to the Baroque master Caravaggio, with her emotive dynamism and dramatic use of lighting.  Using pronounced chiaroscuro, where light and dark violently contrast, the light in her images appears to alternately engulf the female form or to be on the verge of dwindling to nothing, leaving them alone in the abyss of boundless space.  Light isolates her figures, but her use of spotlighting differs from Caravaggio in that it is atmospheric and benevolent; it insulates the figures from the space surrounding them, that empty space which allows light to strike her subjects, not just as transparent dissolvable images of people, but as solid, real, and seemingly impenetrable beings."

"Her figures represent something internal and widely experienced.  She successfully and intelligently depicts the wordless doubts and dreams that all of humanity is heir to.  Beneath the wondrous exterior, at their core, these strange figures are more human than human; their souls are bared and radiant to one and all.”