Communicating with Shadows

Opening a door to mysterious lucidity…
colliding with caves dug by souls in search of obscurity
souls who spent lifetimes to unlearn what is tangible to discover magic,
walking through walls, to communicate with shadows,
accepting the unusual, and holding dear its seldomness
for we will all open our eyes.

—Dylan Kane Landin

As a child I was fascinated with the magic of the camera. There was something mystical, almost holy, about a piece of time captured that could be viewed again and again and that could evoke memories and emotions so intensely.

With my latest body of work—and all of my work, in fact—I am not always clear about my intention. Rather I seem almost to be led to these images. There is something of the search for the self, something too of a journey into the Absolutely Other. Perhaps it is simply a matter of keeping one’s inner eyes open.

I’ve written elsewhere—and I stand by these words, “Of every photograph I make there’s a place that looks like this in the deepest part of me…I find myself there unexpectedly, and the going there can only be reached without thought…My images are my voice, sometimes a whisper, sometimes not.”

The critic Rick Newby, writing in Black & White Magazine (February2003), had this to say about earlier work very much akin to my latest images:

“Landin’s quietly intense tableaux—most often featuring figures that might be herself, but are, in fact, her young daughter (‘to me’, she says, ‘they're self-portraits’)—render a shadow world, a place on the verge of waking where the self is most solitary, vulnerable, and open to realities of the spirit…Landin’s images offer not instances of the eroticized male gaze, but rather one woman’s experience from within, captured with grace, tenderness, and sometimes, as Landin notes, ‘bone-deep sorrow.’”

My photographs are born from my heart. I do this thing called taking pictures for my needs and for my wholeness as much as I do it for the capturing and the sharing.