Mark Lawrence McPhail

I was born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I became interested in photography as a teenager. As an undergraduate I studied photography at Emerson College, in Boston Massachusetts, where two of my photographs were published in the Emerson Review. During graduate school I worked part time as a photojournalist for the Campus Connection in Amherst, Massachusetts, and later as a photographer and editorial consultant for Digital Equipment Corporation. My photography has also been featured in the academic journal Critical Studies in Mass Communication, and I am currently working on a photographic field guide on birds of San Salvador Island in the Bahamas. My work has been exhibited at the Mac Worthington Gallery in Columbus, Ohio, and the Blue Heron Gallery in Liberty, Indiana.

This series of photographs brings together my love of photography and my affinity for Buddhism and Japanese culture.  They represent a creative exploration into the dynamics of light, color, and the visual possibilities of language.  The Japanese kanji inscribed on the images of koi can be roughly translated as “visions of love,” a play on the word “koi,” which is how the Japanese word for “love” is pronounced.  The circular symbol that graces the garden images is “enso,” the Japanese word for “circle,” which in Buddhist philosophy symbolizes enlightenment, elegance, and the universe that is contained in a single brush stroke.  These images seek to embody the principles and practices of contemporary change and transformation in photography as they are revealed in the shift toward digital imaging and manipulation and the crossing of artistic boundaries.  I offer them as an aesthetic narrative about the intersections between the visual and the verbal, and  an exploration of the subtle spaces between seeing and saying.