"My objective is not to show the viewer what these places look like, but rather what they feel like."
Using long exposures ranging from twenty seconds to sixty minutes, Fokos filters from his pictures what he calls the "visual noise" of everyday life in order to reveal the fundamental, underlying forms of our world. It is to these forms that he believes people respond on a visceral level. In one particular image of Boston's Storrow Drive, Fokos recalls a ten-minute-long exposure during which his camera sifted-out 579 cars, nineteen joggers, seven pedestrians, five roller-bladers, four bicyclists, a pair of twins in a stroller and one dog. His pictures are calm, clean, sensational windows to the world we know through the assemblage of our combined experience. Fokos' pictures have been published widely and are a part of many public, corporate and private collections.
"The camera records a world different from the one we experience because it doesn’t record emotion, and it only sees the world in strange, artificial, frozen slices of time. But this is not how we experience life. We experience our world quite differently — our sense of experience is built up over time as composite of many short-term events."
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1960, David Fokos' interest in photography began at age eleven. An admirer of Ansel Adams, Fokos bought his first view-camera while at Cornell University, where he studied electrical engineering. Fokos has worked since his graduation in 1984 as a high-end speaker designer in Boston and most recently in San Diego. He has become one of the prominent names in contemporary photography, constantly working from his thesis that our impression of the world is based upon our total experience. Writes the Los Angeles Times, "Stunning in their simplicity and elegance… [Fokos' photographs create] a safe haven for contemplation or simply pure reverie… His photographs are welcome moments of reprieve, visual sanctuaries in black, white and gray."
Selected Collections:
Banana Republic Collection
McGraw-Hill Collection
Microsoft Collection
Ritz Carlton Hotels Collection
Swedish Hospital, Seattle, WA
Texaco Corporation Collection
The Capital Group Collection
Arch Capital Collection
Fidelity Investments Collection
Museum of Fine Art, Houston, TX
Boise Art Museum, Boise, Idaho
Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, CA