2000-2008

Emerald Emission Large Format 

Long Night Exposures 

 

The Darkness Visible  Series 

represents Susan Kaiser Vogel,s embarkation on her most mature investigative study of the absence of light. It taps the vein that has been ever present throughout her  career.

 

Returning to the southern California light that inspired her early site-specific works and armed with the experience of encapsulating the atmosphere in her Bronze Series, Vogel set forth at night to capture the absence of light in her long, meditative and very personal photographic series.

 

Using a 4 x 5 camera and infrared technology, Vogel ventured to the darkest beaches in southern California in the darkest hours of night to capture the ephemeral glimpse of night “light” in varying exposures of 30-90minutes in which the night sky and ocean meet on an electric horizon invisible to the naked eye.

 

Captured through the transformative apertures prevalent in many of her earlier brick constructs such as WoMan (1981) and This Side and Beyond, Plum Blossom Domain (1983), the ocean aptly provided its own mark throughout the long exposures by means of ambient light and naturally occurring bioluminescent organisms that came crashing in with each wave, producing an electric etching of the 

transitory natural atmosphere.  

​

Vogel’s use of the aperture to capture and encapsulate the absence of light began with her earliest installation in which the young artist conceived and commissioned her first construct. Comprised of a narrow vertical window in the exterior wall of her bedroom in her parents' Manhattan Beach home that would allow her to escape to the same dark night beaches of 1950s southern California.

 

Vogel saved pennies for a year to achieve the piece and enlisted the professional assistance of adult architect friends to produce stamped engineering drawings.

 

Orchestrating the installation to be completed in one day before her parents returned from work, the aperture remained unnoticed for some time thus allowing

the young Vogel to slip into the dark night and begin her pursuit of the study darkness and the subsequent absence of light that would mark her entire career. She was 11 years old.