Book cover of Bending Light: The Moods of Color, with a portrait of female model wearing pink lipstick, with face partly submerged in water. Published by Images Publishing.

Bending Light

The Moods of Color

By (author) Eric Meola

$85.00

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A visual journey around the world of one hundred iconic photographs taken by celebrated and multi-award-winning photographer, Eric Meola
An intimate and personal account of Eric Meola's creative process and self-expression, including the telling of the stories behind the creation of each photograph
A showcase of the expert use of visual language, informed by writers, painters, musicians, and a desire to create visual metaphor with imagery
The Professional Photographers of America noted that “Eric Meola champions photography as a visual language capable of great emotion. He’s a photographer with a love affair for color, light, and artistic freedom.”

Full Description

“Legendary Bruce Springsteen photographer’s iconic travel images showcased in lavish new coffee-table book, from storms in South Dakota to penguins in Antarctica.” — The Daily Mail

Bending Light: The Moods of Color showcases photographer Eric Meola’s use of light and color throughout his career of editorial, advertising, and personal work. In one hundred iconic photographs, including recent experiments with color abstracts, and in dozens of stories and anecdotes, he examines his five-decade journey using color in photography, its symbolism, and how it affects our moods.

Meola’s work is informed by writers, painters, musicians, and the desire to create visual metaphors with his imagery — whether intimate portraits, unique landscapes, or color-saturated abstracts, his use of geometry within the frame of the photograph creates a tension that is instantly recognizable.

In awarding him its Lifetime Achievement Award for 2023, the Professional Photographers of America noted that “Eric Meola champions photography as a visual language capable of great emotion. He’s a photographer with a love affair for color, light, and artistic freedom.”

As Meola says, “Light and color are my subject as much as the subject itself. It’s the confluence of color with light — the movement within the color — that’s important to me. Although the end image is a still photograph, the story of its creation, the how and why it came to be, is part of every photographer’s psyche. Telling the stories behind the photographs is my way to revisit the creative process, both as a means of introspection as well as expression. Photography has always been a way for me to create what I feel, and feel as I create.”

Bending Light: The Moods of Color takes us on a visual journey around the world as Meola tells the story behind the creation of each image, giving insight into the thought process behind creating photographs. A photographer from Rangefinder magazine referred to him as one of “a handful of color photographers who are true innovators.”

About the Author

Eric Meola studied photography at the Newhouse School of Journalism at Syracuse University and graduated with a B.A. in English Literature. Meola’s photographs are included in the archive of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., the International Center of Photography in New York, the George Eastman Museum, and Die Neue Sammlung (Design Museum) in Munich. His previous books include Last Places on Earth (Graphis, 2004), Born to Run: The Unseen Photos (Insight Editions, 2006), India: In Word & Image (revised edition; Rizzoli 2013), and Fierce Beauty: Storms of the Great Plains (Images Publishing, 2019). He has received numerous awards, including “Advertising Photographer of the Year” in 1986 from the American Society of Media Photographers, a “Power of the Image” George Eastman award in 2014, and, in 2023, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Professional Photographers of America, which noted that “Meola has distinguished himself in his career, which spans more than five decades, and has brought passion, service, and a vivid celebration of color to the photographic industry.” Eric and his wife, photographer Joanna McCarthy, live in Sagaponack, New York, on the south shore of Long Island. Carol McCusker received an M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History and the History of Photography from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, under Professors Eugenia Parry and Geoff Batchen. Her undergraduate B.A. was from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. She was Curator at the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, and is presently the Cofrin Endowed Curator of Photography for the Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida, Gainesville. McCusker has curated over 65 exhibitions and won several awards, among them the Center for Creative Photography Ansel Adams Research Fellowship, Tucson; two Andy Warhol Foundation Awards; and two National Endowment for the Arts Awards. She writes regularly about photography and reviews portfolios internationally. And, like her friend and mentor, photo-historian Bill Jay (1940–2009), she advocates for visual literacy education — the how and why of making photographs.

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