N.P. Thompson

Chrome

Neckline

Georgian Terrace

Blade Runner

sepia sea/interplanetary dream

blue expanse

the church

blue chan variation

Midnight in the Pearl District

Artist Statement

Although I shot on film intermittently through the ‘90s and early ‘00s, my photographic excursions didn’t begin in earnest until the late winter of 2008 in Colorado, when a friend loaned me her digital camera, and I began to document my daily jaunts around a frozen lake. As a child of the American Southeast, I continue to find snow exotic—even at my comparatively advanced age. Those early digital experiments were a way, I suppose, of bringing those alluring snow and ice patterns into the warmth and comfort of a Denver townhouse. They were mine, and I would never be without snow again.

My aesthetic soon expanded from wintry nature to an ongoing fixation with glass surfaces, with how solid structures elide into one another—or appear to.

Back when I was still writing film criticism, I made a point, as often as I could, of writing about film as a visual medium. Instead of burying the reader with plot summaries, I wrote about what the camera was capturing: the fluidity of motion, the range of colors, an indelible shot and how it conveyed a director’s vision, or the marriage of sight and sound, or how editing choices either served or short-changed the moving (literally, emotionally) images flickering by.

The photographs archived at Centuries Since the Day stem from my gradual disenchantment from evaluating other artists’ art. In other words, I wasn’t seeing what I wanted and needed to see. And that I could only manage by creating it myself.

N.P. Thompson’s Website