As early as 1490, when Leonardo da Vinci described the Camera Obscura as “This it is that guides the human discourse to the considering of divine things. Here the figures, here the colors, here all the images of every part of the universe are contracted to a point. O what a point is so marvelous!”, the mission of countless artists has been capturing the colors of our world. And for Eric Meola, the camera has been his conduit.
After his book Fierce Beauty: Storms of the Great Plains (Images Publishing, 2019) Meola has followed up with a smaller, yet more intimate volume that uncannily speaks larger and deeper about this artist’s quest to capture a purity of color. Bending Light: The Moods of Color (Images Publishing, 2024) traces the broad arc of Meola’s career and gives us a proper overview of a lifetime spent reducing and refining his sense of color.
One striking note about this gem of a book is that it presents photographs from 1972 – 2024 in a random flow where it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between a hi-res negative scan and a hi-res digital picture. The scale of the images is just unexpected enough to display stopping power without the reader being overwhelmed solely based on size. Hovering somewhere between one’s lap and the kitchen table, this book shares its charms through a traditional approach to layout — right-hand text page opposite full-frame, mostly horizontal photographs — that gives honor to the combination of words and images.
Additionally, it’s the rare photographer who can write as well as they see, but Eric Meola does both with clarity and insight. The backstories accompanying most of the photographs resonate with the understanding that some photographers not only know where to stand to unearth kernels of beauty, but that they also have a razor-sharp sense of recall that puts us with them at the moment of capture.
From his time as an assistant to Pete Turner, and his once-in-a-lifetime session with Bruce Springsteen and Clarence Clemons for the cover of Born to Run, to this year’s honor as a featured artist at Xposure 24 (the global photography juggernaut making waves in the middle east), the work in Bending Light could be a primer on learning how to see and where to stand.
Indeed, those two core elements of photography are crucial to a life spent choosing what to shoot and when. Like great chefs who work steadily and meticulously refining and reducing a perfect sauce until its elements are in subtle balance with one another, the photos in Bending Light pulse with a rhythm and balance all their own while sharing universal subject matter.
With Motel Mojave Desert, California 1978, a crisp rendering of a humbly constructed building with a red neon sign buzzing its message, Meola’s definitive eye clearly states its presence through the raw portrayal of colors, both intuitive and nostalgic. The freedom and loneliness of long-distance travel, the yearning for a simpler time when lodging didn’t come with corporate attachment; these are just a few of the subliminal chords struck in this saturated palette.
From Iceland to India, Nevada to the Netherlands, and California to China, Meola is always seeking a minimalist vision of clarity as evidenced by photographs made this year during his visit to the Middle East. Kaleidoscopic Ceiling Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates 2024 is a document of architectural fantasy best appreciated as a photograph; the abstract forms pulse and vibrate with energy akin to one’s first-time viewing of light and color through a kaleidoscope.
As Meola says in describing his photograph Oil in Water Sagaponack, New York 2023, “I photograph by a simple mantra: Color and light are my subject as much as the subject itself. We soar with color, and the confluence of light and color defines our existence, resonates in our souls, and ricochets in time with our emotions, creating a landscape of the mind, our eyes, and our mood.”
From being awarded ASMP’s Advertising Photographer of the Year in 1986 to his Lifetime Achievement Award from the Professional Photographers of America in 2023, Meola’s output has been at the forefront of photography’s power as a true exemplar of the art of bending light.
Eric Meola, Bending Light: The Moods of Color is available for $85 at Images Publishing.
