Welcomed Pixels Photographic Projects (WPPP) is the commercial production house (more closely resembling a bungalow) tucked between the folds of Rodd Zinberg’s art practice. A wing of the Studio devoted to the image as others would like to have it held, Welcomed Pixels is focused on realizing the broad expanses of the “miraculous capture." The bungalow offers its photographic services for:
Portraits
Architectural and Interior spaces
Event coverage and publicity.
Singular or Collaborative visions.
Rodd Zinberg is a Los Angeles based artist and photographer. Rodd received his BFA in Communication Design (sometimes called Visual Communications) with a concentration in Illustration from Washington University in St. Louis. He received his MFA in Fine Arts from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.. Born and raised in LA, Rodd began taking pictures using his dad's Olympus OM1: “It had all the nobs and pulls and clicks on it, I dug that you could see all its mechanisms right then and there, nothing was hidden. It was bare bones. I don’t know how many times I’d just play with the push lever and the shutter button when there wasn’t any film, unclipping its backside, almost like a woman’s bra, and the outcome of the film you just shot, like the, well you know what…try and find that kind of intimacy with a camera made these days.
“The relationship made sense for awhile. There wasn’t any need for digital, to move on, to try the newest models. I certainly didn’t fall in love with the camera because of its contemporaneity. I loved how sturdy and old and hard it was. The steel encasing impressed me, and it was really pretty light; lighter than the Canon 5D I use now. I used it mainly as a visual recording device, of my day and what I encountered. I used it to observe and I used it to mark those observations in time. It’s a common practice to learn how to draw from life, and if you can’t do it in person, then to do it from a photograph, so I used it to take pictures of things I wanted to draw.
Finally, the day came when digital seemed a matter of immanence, and the ability to work without welcoming its parlance was doable no more. If you know me at all, or if you know my work at all, you know I am obsessed with materiality, with tactility, and with technologies that have lost their time, but I learned in grad school not to be too nostalgic, and I learned from an old boss not to be too attached; and, it’s not like I was ever really a big dark room guy anyway. I treat photography like a printmaker; the image like a surprise for the eyes. The process and action of creating and constituting an image is the flip side of its fantastic result. However close you are to seeing it as it is being seen, the snap action slice of time that is cut produces an edge of existence that cannot be seen until after the knife, or camera, is removed. There is a shutter, a gate, of uncontrollability one must jump through in image making, like a floating abyss one must take a leap of faith, into in order to reach its realm. However much you prepare and execute according to plan, there is always a smidgeon of the unpredictable, the unexpected, the unaccounted for, and you have to be game for that. It’s the tingle that keeps on tingling.
There is magic inside a picture. It is a print of surreality posing as reality, and as much as you can go and revisit it and what it represents, it resentfully tells you you can’t, that’s it’s all in your head, all in a picture, all in an idea, which isn’t real, and never was. The image represents multiple realities, perceptions, and times all locked in and cloaked as one. It’s almost an object that shields itself opaque, but yields itself frank. It is unnervingly immobile logged in expired time. As much as you can imagine being there, you’re not, and as much as you think about the moment divorced from the photograph, it’s not. It’s perplexing and exciting, logical yet hard to understand, simple yet complex. A good picture is permanence and impermanence vibrating in tune, silently humming the pitch to life’s bloom.
For more info on Rodd Zinberg and his art practice, please click on “rodd zinberg studio.” You will be led to the Studio’s website.
