It all started with a tripod.
And it ended with eerie photos packed with colors the human eye simply cannot see by itself.
Adrian Lesoing, a photography junior, opened the showcase of his photography exhibit “Suburbia: 85201,” an exhibition of night photos taken in Mesa, Ariz., at the Business Administration building on the Tempe campus Wednesday. It will be open until Jan. 4.
The photos are the result of a summer color darkroom class where Lesoing experimented with overexposure and long shutter speeds. Armed with the new tripod her fiancé gave her, she produced haunting night images of the neighborhood she lives in.
“Because these are night photos and I overexposed them, it makes the sky look like daytime and the reflection of the streetlights adds an eerie effect,” Lesoing said, adding that she took many photos of yards flooded by irrigation to produce the effect.
Though the photography technique Lesoing used is not new, her personal style is very unique, said Logan Bellow, a photography junior and the vice president of the Photographers’ Association at ASU who was n the class with Lesoing.
Lesoing originally started with several different concepts including photographing vegetables and foreclosed homes, but eventually moved on to photographing at night, Bellew said. The effect, he added, was quite uncomfortable — which is a good thing.
“I like the photos because they make me feel weird and creepy and eerie,” Bellew said, adding that the problem with many photos is that they don’t invoke any feeling in the viewer. “Her photos make me a feel a little uncomfortable and that’s a good thing, because they make me feel, period.”
The effect is not easy to catch on film, Bellew said, which is why her photos are so interesting, because they show the viewer something their own eye can’t see.
“They make me see a really odd environment,” he said. “It might not be a place I want to be, but it’s a place I want to be able to see.”
To become a photographer it’s essential to be able to see the common world in an uncommon way, said Christian Widmer, a faculty associate in the School of Art at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts who taught the class. He added that Lesoing has been able to achieve this in her “nearly psychedelic peeks into the Arizona ‘burbs.”
“The long exposure times coupled with the artificial lights that illuminate the evenings transformed the normally banal suburban
landscape into something more mysterious,” he said in an e-mail.
“Something worth a stare rather than just a glance out of the driver’s side window.”
Reach the reporter at allison.gatlin@asu.edu.
