ARTIST’S STATEMENT 

Over the last 20 years I have traveled and photographed in many places, including Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Spain, China, Macao, Italy, Greece and Japan.  Selling some of the photographs I bring back, finances further trips and I am able to continue what I love and do best.  I am not a travel photographer, in that I do not shoot a locale or event on assignment.  Instead, I finance my own travel and am free to concentrate on my own artistic vision of the worlds I encounter. 

I am constantly looking for a way to convey dynamic tension and imply a mystery or scenario that goes beyond the frame.  Composition is more important to me than subject and thinking visually is essential.  By concentrating on form and composition I can create an image which is both abstract visually and literal photographically.  One seeks to make the photo mean more than the subject alone.  The art of photography is a process of ‘capturing’ an evocative image using objective, technical, and visual skills as well as highly subjective, instinctive responses.  It is also a game of chance, waiting for the moment, chasing shadows. 

Spike Mafford
2005

Spike Mafford became fascinated with the graphic and textural qualities of Braille when he encountered books printed in Braille about ten years ago.  He explored ways to incorporate it into his photographs and found that a series of skyscapes begun in the early 1990s seemed to especially welcome the addition of the text.   His interest became less formal and more personal when his father started experiencing periods of diminished vision.  Mafford began thinking about what the loss of sight might be like and looking for ways that sighted and visually impaired people could share an experience with art.   This show includes four large prints and a series of smaller diptychs that illuminate how he has worked to bring image and text into a formally satisfying whole and to intensify the audience’s sensory encounter with the work.  Mafford struggled with the taboo against touching art but gradually accepted that he would have to break this rule to take the work where he wanted it to go.  Now he encourages people to touch and welcomes the physical changes that result when the fingers move over the photograph.  Two of the large photographs are encased in Plexiglas boxes with the text spelled out in clear plastic raised dots on the face of the frame.  In two later pieces Mafford affixed the dots directly to the print itself making the work more intimate and accessible.  In the diptychs, he paired two identical image/text units.  Lisanne Dutton, Peter J. Vogt, and Spike Mafford wrote the text pieces as both abstract and descriptive responses to the images.  People may read the text in the left-hand photograph with their fingers; by the end of the show the units will still be similar but no longer identical.  Mafford hopes that people able to read Braille and those able to see the photographs will share their experiences so that the meaning of the text and the content of the images is available to all.

The Sites of the Labors of Hercules, Greece

Spike Mafford / Michael Spafford
Labors of Hercules Collaboration