Exposure: John S. Needles, Jr.

Tapestry of Dreams Sketch Book Number Nine

All photos ©John S. Needles, Jr. All rights reserved.

"Illumination has filled my sketchbook with bold, mysterious, shadows and light for me to piece together in what I call Photographic Collages. Two pivotal inspirations to my life artistically have been French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–) who became known as the photographer who captured ‘the decisive moment,’ and the English Romantic landscape and marine artist J.M.W.Turner (1775–1851), who became known as ‘the painter of light.’ My footsteps in life have taken me to Paris and Venice, both places that Cartier-Bresson and Turner have traveled. During my journeys I have used film and camera as my sketchbook, filling new books with fleeting, atmospheric colors capturing the decisive and fleeting moments of light as I saw them. Just as Turner took his watercolor sketch books in the studio and produced grand oil paintings, so I take my photographic images and work with them in the digital world producing photographic prints. The computer has become my painting instrument and the printer my canvas to a new realm beyond imagination. The direct extension of a photograph to a scanned image to photographic print is limitless. In my final images a new world unfolds, one filled with color, vision, and the beauty of a painting."

Needles’ work has appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Wilmington News Journal, Delaware State News and other publications, as well as several schools’ collections. He has won numerous awards. Needles was born in San Raefel, California and spent most of his preteen and teenage life in Cape May, New Jersey. He currenty lives in Philadelphia.

The work featured here can also be viewed at Xando Cosí on Walnut Street through August.

Technical: Images are shot on 35mm color slide film and then scanned into digital form.

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