Photographing a dream is a task that may seem strange at first. A drawing, a 3D visualization, or a feature film might be understandable. But a photo? Yet, this is precisely how New Jersey-based photographer Kyle Lang, known primarily for his landscape photographs, presents his latest work.
As a child, Lang suffered from nightmares and, to overcome them, kept a dream diary. As he grew older, he began to practice lucid dreaming – one of the phase states, a term that also includes out-of-body travel. At the same time, Kyle tried to express his experience through photos. In his new series, Manifest Content, he explores the themes of time, memory, dreams, and the subconscious.
Of course, his works are not photos from a dream in the literal sense. What Kyle creates is more of a play with light. He enters a “limbo between dream and reality allowing easier communication between subconscious and paper.” And then, based on scenes from his own dreams, he takes pictures using several negatives and different enlargers.
As Lang told Analog Forever magazine, “I used photography as a means to make sense of recurring dreams I would have. I made a journal to help me keep track of them, then I began to draw them, and eventually took inspiration from them to create photographs. This idea of recreating dreams through photos introduced me to a new way of seeing the medium. The resulting prints from this exercise didn’t make logical sense but were they not documentational to some degree? They are, after all, photographs.”
In 2020, Kyle applied for a grant designated for painters. He knew he wasn’t a painter, but he was, in a sense, painting with light. To his own surprise, he got the funding, along with the obligation to tour the United States, creating photographs for Manifest Content, and this trip gave rise to the collection.
