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Charles Titterington

Charles Titterington’s surreal conceptual images grow from the same famously strange southern roots as Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, William Faulkner’s novels, and the photographs of Clarence John Laughlin.  Though he lives and works in the modernized and Disneyfied Orlando area, his images include swamps and serpents, mysteries and metaphors, executed in folded darknesses with shocks of blue, green, and red. The emotional atmospheres he creates come from his imagination’s blueprints, theatrical stagecraft, and mastery of camera technique.  Each photograph could be a still from a film, the frame capturing its subject suspended in time, in splendid isolation. Titterington builds his images.  The process often begins with carpentry and the tools in his workshed long before he breaks out the Canon and the Godox and the Lightroom.   Usually using scavenged wood and backyard settings, he builds toward his final concept one nail at a time.  Although his constructions are disassembled and repurposed and his property returns to normal when a shoot is done, the images stick in memory, repeating when one least expects them. 

"To express my emotions through this medium empowers me to keep going. There is a level of solace that I feel when I finish some work. Not all of my work is dark, although I think it can be perceived that way. There is a level of honesty in my work. I enjoy showcasing the various mood swings in life. When I walk through a piece of land scorched from a prescribed burn, I see the destruction, but I also see the life, the endurance that survives the fire. I aim to capture the emotion and honesty that is just under the surface."

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