The Point of Secret.

The Point of Secret. By Marc Yankus. ClampArt, 2008. 48pp., illustrated throughout, 5,5x8,25". Images from here.

Book description:

"In his newest [2008] body of work, Yankus explores mysterious points of intersection - moments when reality and illusion plausibly overlap.

Think of a daydream or the haze when waking from a particularly sound sleep. Such gentle transitions are the subject of the artist’s recent photographs. Yankus eloquently writes:

'I am especially fascinated with the city in its rare moments of tranquility - as it sinks into slumber, as it rouses itself to face a new day. At such times the city is all abstraction - looming shapes, diffused light, spectral shadows.
In these moments of transient repose, when its elements are briefly cloaked in softness, a kind of beauty envelopes even the most mundane street scene . . . and my work aims to capture that ineluctable quality.'

Just as the city is a layering of decades upon decades - brownstones set against vast towered backdrops of shining glass and steel - Yankus assembles his photographs in a similar style.

Originally trained as a painter, the artist began constructing collages over twenty years ago. Eventually, he began to fold his own photographs into his work, and then, with the advent of digital technologies in the early 1990s, the artist devised a new kind of layering on the computer screen.

Beginning with his own soft-focused digital images shot on the streets of the city where he was born and raised, Yankus overlays the photographs with various textures, including scratches and dings from the surfaces of old, flea market tintypes or with the subtle paper patterns from blank pages of yellowing, musty books, effectively melding the present and the past."