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| My artwork derives from the exploration of the inner self, and its contrast with the physical world. I use dreams and the subconscious as a starting place to envision new imagery. I strive to create pieces that incorporate a sense of spirit or mind-body interrelationship, and at the same time tell a story. Mediums For five years, I have been using Polaroid emulsion transfer onto watercolor paper as the final product of many of my images. The process to get there may start with an original concept that I photographed traditionally in black and white. I scan those images, add color to them, print them, and then re-photograph them with Polaroid film. Polaroid transfers allow for a more organic composition, as the image becomes less restricted to the rectangle. The emulsion, once removed from its substrate and floating free in water, has a life of its own, adding to the mystery of the unpredictable. The images in my other galleries are photographed using 4 by 5 inch view cameras or digital cameras. For these images I use a different pre-visualization process, but the basis is the same. Ballroom Dance The world of ballroom dance competition is strange, wonderful, and exhilarating; I have been documenting dancers for the last six years. The sport in the United States in now dominated by Russian and Eastern European immigrants, who have amalgamated their culture to American ideals for a better life. Although the competition is fierce, the camaraderie and sense of family and community off the floor transcends all else. I have been fortunate to follow and get to know the competitors and their families and watch the dancer's progression over the years. The images I have created interpret not only the beauty and athleticism of the dance, but also the joy, the pathos, and the drama. About Me I have worked as a museum and fine art photographer since the late 1970's. I exhibit in the mid-Atlantic region, as well as New York City and California. I received an Individual Artist Fellowship for 2000 from the Delaware Division of the Arts. My studio is located in Wilmington, Delaware, USA. |
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"Inspired by dreams, the work of master photographer Carson Zullinger is an artistic expression of his innermost fantasies, thoughts, and impulses. It documents a Jungian dreamscape that resides within him. The human form, Carson relates, serves as his "metaphorical palette" allowing him to articulate this vision in terms that we can hopefully all understand and relate to. Carson's work is decidedly eclectic and varies greatly from one image to the next. Some pieces are dark and garishly beautiful, other works are festivals of color and dreamy play. It lacks unity and cohesion. But the subconscious is not rational, was not meant to be channeled, and being the wellspring from which he draws inspiration, Carson lets it fly free, trying only to capture brief glimpses for us all to share." www.Michelle7.com "Gazing at a series of Carson Zullinger's images can be a somewhat disorienting experience: the aesthetic space he occupies shifts dramatically from one picture to the next. At times, his photographic imagination seems deeply grounded in the natural world. And yet in other visuals, he abandons the color and compositional schemes we associate with our surroundings for a far more fantastic dreamscape. For all the technical wonders at his disposal, the underwater camera, and the multi-stepped processes, Zullinger ultimately relies on a graceful touch that suffuses his every image." Susan Dominus, Editor in Chief, © 2000 Nerve.com "Zullinger's photos fuse light and shadow as natural elements in figure photography. He explores the dualities of figures that are studies in motion and time, with bodies meshing in lights and dark, or figures becoming ghostly images of themselves. The collection also resonates with a transcendental, spiritual view of the figure, as women are visualized leaving their skin, and attuning to an inner dance that comes with the freedom of the body." Michelle Mullen, Photography Editor for www.suite101.com, 1999 "Carson Zullinger is a photographer whose work is theatrical in its power to juggle drama and pathos with wonder. He remakes our world into his own, and our surrender to it is in part due to the familiarity we bring to it, engrams of our own making that challenge themselves through his lenswork. The mystery here of course serves its maker well, though we give ourselves over to it readily. R.B. Strauss, Art Matters , 2005 |
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