July 4th.

We all take firework pictures but not many as successful as those by Pierre LeHors, a young American (in spite of the name) photographer I was introduced to by David Strettel of Dashwood Books.

I was looking for some unusual pictures for a client's summer house and Strettel pointed out LeHors' book "Firework Studies".

As LeHors says in his artist's statement, "By constraining nearly all tonal values to stark blacks and pure whites, the trails, explosions and clouds of debris are reduced to a series of simple repeated formal elements: arced lines, spherical bursts, and randomly dispersed particles. i made no effort to limit digital artifacts resulting from pushing the image files past their conventional range; the resulting noise becomes hard to distinguish from the texture of the fireworks themselves."

We ended up selecting a group of 8 to hang in a grid, but rather than print them photographically LeHors chose to make silkscreens of each image thereby pushing the tonal values and painterly qualities even further. Anyway, it worked out really well and if you're interested, the book can be purchased at Dashwood. Just click here.

And happy 4th!