SEAN LOTMAN: Painting His Own Reality

To announce SEAN LOTMAN as a featured HAPTIC artist, here is an essay on why I love his work.

Painting your own reality

As artists, we all see the world in a different way. Our duty as an artist is to share our perspective and viewpoint with the world.

I am against “descriptive” photography— pictures that try to show what reality “really looks like.” Rather, I’m more interested in showing a “false” reality, a “surreal” reality— or creating your own reality.

Sean Lotman does this, by shooting all his pictures on expired slide color film, and then “cross-processing” his images. Then, he does all his color prints (by hand, in his own home color darkroom, and prints his own images). All the images you see from him are his scans, directly of his prints.

Sean has inspired a lot of my color photography. How so? I don’t like low contrast, “realistic” color pictures. To me, “Normal” color pictures are boring. I like high contrast and high saturation. I like having my eyes being tickled, by vibrant colors which I can taste… like biting into a juicy orange or tangerine.

Anyways, Sean shows that as artists, we should NOT just be “photographers.” Sean crops his pictures, flips them upside down, dodges and burns, and paints with his camera like a painter. He is not interested in “traditional” rule-based, dogmatic photography. He’s making his own rules, and having fun with it.

So ultimately Sean reminds me to have fun with photography, to keep my photography and art very subjective and very personal, and to morph and shape reality however I want to.

Sean is a true artist — stubborn to his creative vision, and one of a kind with his colorful painting pictures.