Artist Statement:
The traditional film camera has all but disappeared from the contemporary landscape. It sits as an analog relic from a bygone era, but also serves as a critical historic object, as an evolutionary pivot, which ushered us into our current image-obsessed world. By casting vintage film cameras as hollow forms within a solid block of glass, I’m highlighting the technology’s lost physicality, the invisible magic of the craft-based photographic process, and the camera’s role in transmuting our visual perception of the world.
Within Joshua Hershman’s cast glass sculptural works he explores the invisible and counter-intuitive nature of light. Born almost blind, Hershman underwent years of corrective vision therapy to train his visual cortex to comprehend peripheral vision and depth perception. Enduring these repeated exercises he became acutely aware of the curious nature of visual anomalies and light distortions. Hershman’s current glass cameras reveal the invisible processes of photography in three-dimensions. These works ask the audience to see the camera as an alchemical tool for manipulating and translating light. From this perspective, we may seriously consider the profound implications that this “capturing light in imagery” has had on our species, both how we see our world and ourselves.