John Lehet

I’ve been making archival, carefully crafted fine art photographs in the Upper Valley for almost 50 years, starting as a Dartmouth student in the darkroom in the basement of Robinson Hall. Through this period I’ve worked with a view camera and 4 x 5 inch film, medium format, in my own darkroom, and now I’m finding that with pigment-ink prints on fine art paper I’m getting prints that surpass what I was able to pull after long days in the darkroom.  

My printer now is the size of a sideways fridge, with 12 colors of archival pigment ink. I print on many different papers, depending on what the image needs, often with “papery” papers showing some textures, but also on baryta papers that look like old fiber based silver gelatin papers I used in the darkroom.  I’m still scanning that old sheet film, so that still fits into the continuum of my work. But newer images are from a large sensor “full frame” digital camera. 

I am serious about technique and especially the use of vintage lenses these days. Although good technique and equipment may be important in conveying a strong statement, technique is in the service of the message, a means and not an end. The point is: can an image can ring us like a bell, create a resonance with the world? And to ring us like that, the photograph must stand alone. It’s not the thing or appearance that was in front of the lens. It is its own object, with its own rules about how it works. The print must stand alone. 

Many of my images are landscapes, mostly from exposures in  New Hampshire and Vermont, but with a few distant situations in the mix. Many of these images are inspired by the luminous quality of light, and also an interplay with the transience and impermanence of the world it shines on.

Bouncing back and forth across the Connecticut River for all these years, I’ve been settled in Vermont for this last stretch, twenty years straight now, and I intend to stay as long as I can.

These are mostly exposed near places where I’ve lived; places I’ve connected with deeply, and a few places in my travels that have had resonance beyond “nice vacation.” To me it is never “that same old place down the road,” ever. The light, the situation; it’s all changing as fast as I can respond to it, both in connecting emotionally and in reacting photographically. And I change each time I open the shutter. It’s a new relationship with the world, each moment.

Photography and a view of impermanence, with which these are made, end up being a collision of opposites. The photograph seems to freeze a moment; there is inherently a sense of stopping time. Of course, time did not stop. Really what we keep is a visual pattern, textures, colors, form, a world of its own, now with only  an imaginary connection to the bigger world, which has gone on its way and changed. The contradiction at some level makes the experience of the impermanence deeper and more poignant, in an odd way. We see what was. We know it's gone. We move forward with the textures, forms, and colors on the paper.

My images are of transient states, 

places that are no longer the same, fleeting light and atmosphere, snow, mist, and dew. A place like Post Pond or my garden, visited often, is more a process than any kind of fixed thing. The same vantage points, the same place, but everything is different. Really, life is like this in every situation. 

John Lehet