Dana Maltby is the rare artist who can sign his work using light. That’s because he specializes in a little-known arm of fine art photography in which light is “painted” onto an image using luminous tools and cameras set for ultra-slow exposure times. Amazingly, this so-called “light art performance photography” generally doesn’t employ post-production touchups. All Maltby used to create this otherworldly scene is, as he puts it, “the crappiest single-lens SLR you can get,” and light-up toys and manipulated Christmas lights. His main subject tends to be his own acrobatic silhouette, which he prefers to shoot in abandoned buildings or sewer tunnels in Minneapolis. “I’ve been telling people part of [my art] is being a little scared, out there by myself,” he says of his potentially treacherous shooting locales. “It wouldn’t be the same without the danger.” The recent grad of the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul says that he hopes this unique art form becomes more commonplace in the photography world, adding that, “it’s like anything—hip hop, skateboarding—the more people do it, the greater it grows.”
Camera: Canon EOS REBEL T1i; exposure: 99 seconds; aperture: f/5.0 ISO: 100; taken: 8/3/09
Notes on this article: I talked to Dana Maltby for about an hour. It turned out he was about my age, which made me feel under-accomplished. This interview actually has a long addition to it, which covers him dealing with a similar artist dying, although I'm not sure it ever went up on the website.
