Carl Chiarenza, whose extraordinary career as a photographer, writer and teacher now spans five decades, remains a name relatively unknown among the pantheon of American masters. His
photographs, luminous, dark, coruscated with deep shadows, and alive with the play of light. are challenging and abstract, studies of blacks and whites in the ancient and honorable tradition of
chiaroscuro. His intention is to push the photograph beyond the boundaries of the "real," to investigate the realms of imagination where space and surface intertwine and where the "real" is
transformed into a wholly visual event.
In the pages of this small-format book, we see displayed the fruits of an entire career, and viewers can judge this "life force" for themselves. Here is a testament to an artist of
extraordinary power, intelligence, and imagination who asks that you, the viewer, "move, moment to moment, from within the accessible and familiar to the realm of the unknown." In the hands and
through the eyes of this modern master, it is a Journey well worth pursuing.
