Bending Light

Bending Light: The Moods of Color showcases photographer Eric Meola’s use of light and colour throughout his career of editorial, advertising, and personal work. In one hundred iconic photographs, including recent experiments with colour abstracts, and in dozens of stories and anecdotes, he examines his five-decade journey using colour in photography, its symbolism, and how it affects our moods.Meola’s work is informed by writers, painters, musicians, and the desire to create visual metaphors with his imagery—whether intimate portraits, unique landscapes, or colour-saturated abstracts, his use of geometry within the frame of the photograph creates a tension that is instantly recognisable.In awarding him its Lifetime Achievement Award for 2023, the Professional Photographers of America noted that “Eric Meola champions photography as a visual language capable of great emotion. He’s a photographer with a love affair for colour, light, and artistic freedom.”As Meola says, “Light and colour are my subject as much as the subject itself. It’s the confluence of colour with light — the movement within the colour — that’s important to me. Although the end image is a still photograph, the story of its creation, the how and why it came to be, is part of every photographer’s psyche. Telling the stories behind the photographs is my way to revisit the creative process, both as a means of introspection as well as expression. Photography has always been a way for me to create what I feel, and feel as I create.”Bending Light: The Moods of Color takes us on a visual journey around the world as Meola tells the story behind the creation of each image, giving insight into the thought process behind creating photographs. A photographer from Rangefinder magazine referred to him as one of “a handful of colour photographers who are true innovators.”