Winston Boyer

In the series of photographs called The Views, Boyer has introduced and explored a new way of seeing the world through images.

Just as painters trained in the conventional rules of perspective regularly choose to render a scene with exaggerated or distorted perspective to achieve an effect, photographers control the perspective of their images to serve aesthetic ends. Before digital tools, however, photographers had limited means to manipulate perspective — the focal length of the lens, and on some cameras, lens shift.

Boyer has developed a digital technique to alter the perspective of an image by compressing a very wide panoramic image laterally. The resulting narrower panoramic image renders all the information in the original while shifting what was peripheral toward the center of vision. Viewers of these images sense the exciting strangeness of a new perspective even before they become aware of its origin — if they do.

Just as no flat map is a globe, no camera is an eye, and no photograph can recreate the perspective experienced by a human witness. But viewers are so used to one convention of perspective in photographs that a disruption wakes the mind from habits of looking that have deadened creative faculties and eclipsed the joy of seeing novelty and beauty. New art and new vision like Boyer has forged in The Views will always be required to establish new truths and to make familiar truths strange enough to be seen and experienced vividly again.

The Views series is the subject of Volume 1 of the Trident Gallery Portfolio Series.