A Doc's Photographic Prescription: Shared Peace

John Howell
Posted 8/14/15

When Dr. David Lowe snaps a photograph, he’s looking to share something he believes we all seek – peace.

And he finds peace throughout Rhode Island, in places that are familiar to many of us. …

This item is available in full to subscribers.

Please log in to continue

E-mail
Password
Log in

A Doc's Photographic Prescription: Shared Peace

Posted

When Dr. David Lowe snaps a photograph, he’s looking to share something he believes we all seek – peace.

And he finds peace throughout Rhode Island, in places that are familiar to many of us. There are the iconic scenes like Beaver Tail with its expanse of sky, breaking waves and the sentinel that gives the location identity. Then there are scenes from City Park in Warwick, Roger Williams Park, of coves along the bay, and trails in Goddard Park among straight pines with their trunks painted white from wind-blown snow.

Lowe thinks of his pictures as “windows” through which he wants the viewer “to experience” the scene, and in that process capture peace. Purposely, his photographs are void of people and filled with light, color and detail. He is not looking to tell a story the way a news photographer strives to capture that moment a candidate and a room full of supporters learns he’s won an election or the joy in a mother’s face when she sees her newborn baby for the first time. Albeit those are joyous moments, Lowe finds most of the images we are subjected to full of anxiety, stress and even terror.

He’s looking for something else.

“I call it the ‘wow’; how do you capture the ‘wow’?” Lowe said at the recent opening of an exhibit of his work that will be on display for the next several months in the administrative wing of Kent Hospital. Lowe has a name for his photography – “experiential photography.”

To do it, Lowe seeks to recreate what the brain sees from what the camera saw.

“The camera is a crappy one-eyed beast,” he says. He explains the detail, light and color captured by the human eye is infinitely greater than what the camera is capable of doing.

In what he titles his “photography confessions” that accompanies the exhibit, Lowe recounts how he first started taking pictures at the age of eight. His first subjects were family members. He was fascinated by the ability to capture the image of a person or place that would soon be in the past. He graduated from a Kodak Brownie when his brother brought home a range finder Petri camera from Japan. From there he acquired increasingly sophisticated equipment as he “started his journey with landscape photography.” He was nonetheless frustrated. He wasn’t capturing what his brain was seeing.

He says the “breakthrough” came with his first digital camera in 2000. The camera provided immediate feedback, and with the computer he could manipulate the image. He says after 40 years of “taking disappointing photographs … I finally realized that the camera doesn’t take pictures of things, it takes pictures of light.”

With that revelation Lowe understood he wasn’t looking to take pictures, but to record experiences.

To understand how to do that, Lowe turned to his medical background and analyzed how the brain differentiates a photograph from reality. He has worked at Kent for the past 39 years as the infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist.

In determining what makes a good photograph, Lowe came up with “four essential variables” which he labels the “four Ds.” They are: dimension, the image must be big enough to fill the field of vision; depth, cues for depth have to be in the image or created by the computer; definition, the image must be sharp but not too sharp; and dynamic range. As Lowe explains, the eye has incredible dynamic range where the camera doesn’t.

He points to a photograph of a cobble stone path leading the viewer into a manicured park in early spring. The sky is blue with wisps of white clouds. That’s what he captured when he triggered the shutter. The path and surrounding shrubbery, rocks and trees were all in the shade. That’s not what his eye had seen.

Using gradient masks in the computer, he “rescues” the detail in the dark areas. He also uses the computer to add cues by altering the play of light and blurring the background. Dimensions of the photograph are adjusted to fill the field of vision. Sometimes this is achieved in multiple photographs that are so precisely woven together they create a single image.

And why aren’t more people in Lowe’s photographs?

“I’m a doctor,” Lowe says, “and in my career I’ve seen 40,000 people.”

It’s not that Lowe doesn’t like people, but he is looking to give them something.

“Really what you want is to live in a peaceful world,” he said.

His photographs are powerful prescriptions to deliver peace … just look out the window.

Comments

No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here