Blaine Herro from San Francisco shoots exclusively in monochrome. His conceptual frames are a game between light and shadow.

A game symbolic of the states of minds and emotions, fluctuating between bright focus and gloomy shade. As the artist expresses himself, he uses photography “to construct sign systems that point toward psychological states, those that, like dreams, resist direct expression and can only be glimpsed obliquely.”

There is rarely a subject in Herro’s works, and when it appears, it is always a silhouette, a shadow, merely a shape within the composition. What he chooses to focus on is not obvious or clear. With each photograph there is a sense of deconstruction and fragmentation. The viewer is clearly instructed to look at what the artist deemed to be the focal point of each scene. What he wants to say through a frame is, in contrast, completely open to interpretation.

The series presented by Herro is not to be translated into imagery but rather into a synesthetic manuscript where visuals are displaced by ideas. Photography becomes a medium of communication with the otherworldly (or innerworldly, if you will) dimension of the mind. Through the windows he creates, emotions pour in as through a Morse code where dots become pixels. The photographer explains that “over time, these encounters accumulate into a personal vocabulary of signs,” evolving from an isolated moment to “a larger lexicon through which the unconscious speaks.”

The three pieces are an illustrative sample of a broader body of work that only reveals their meaning if treated as a whole. “The work as a whole functions as both document and mirror, registering the forces that structure perception itself, forces that are multiple, intimate, and at times disquieting,” Herro concludes.