Op Tics.

Op Tics. Photographs and text by Roger Newton. Nazraeli Press, Tucson, 2006. 40 pp., 30 four-color illustrations, 11x14". Limited edition of 500 copies (first printing).

"The first monograph of 1998 Guggenheim Fellow in Photography Roger Newton, Op Tics is compiled from 10 years of experimental work in the (un)nature of photographic experience. Three parts natural philosophy and two parts photography, Newton’s work proposes a photographic document based on a fluid definition of the lens. Newton makes material and geometric transformations of the photographic system by designing and constructing lenses of oil, water and corn syrup. Suggesting our world seen from the outside and from shifting or unstable reference systems, the images from Newton’s refracting liquid lenses explores the transformative effect complicit in the interaction of the human and mechanical visual apparatuses with the physical world. Part Nightmarish and part Wonderland, Newton takes us on a detour from the traditional photographic narrative directly to the unconscious and the limits of the physical world."

Roger Newton says: The object photographed may have nothing to do with the subject / though the object may be subject. / In its turn the subject is always the object. / I am a maker of objectives.