Artists Tell Their Stories: Ken Wyner, Photographer, Tells His Story

I have been doing photography as a fine art since I was seventeen showing in group shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Of course, even before that I was shooting images. Photography gives me an excuse to slow down and commune with my life. The camera can be a shield that allows you to delve deeply yet be unseen.

At the present time I shoot architecture for clients like Jose Andres and Travis Price, as well as a broad spectrum of commercial clients including interior designers, architects, corporations, and lots of wonderful individuals who dream of being captured by top talent but at basement prices!

I love to shoot even when I am not being paid (most of the time these days)! But the project that my wife, Alice Ng, and I are working on, which has been a very meditative and cathartic process, has been the creation of a series of images called Paving Paradise. It is an idea I came up with as a way to empathize and immortalize the incredibly diverse and tranquil existence that hundreds of people are living in the projected, ugly and mean-spirited path of The Atlantic Coast Pipeline.

I thought the best thing I could do was to do what I do well -- to be a witness to events that are ugly and instead show the contrast of all that is beautiful. This is an ongoing project and just as it is, and will be, a very poignant message to those who would callously destroy so much land and gentle ways of being, these images also serve as a tonic to those caught up in this mess.

Most of participants live in the Nelson County area of Virginia, although we are slowly expanding. Our process consists of going into strangers homes and being with the families, animals, architecture, and nature. Weaving it all into a visual narrative, Alice created the website and I did the photography. Our intention is to send the site far and wide, eventually make a book, and to have an exhibition. We want to bring attention to this cause and, in the process, create positive mantras to dispel the negative energy.

Photographs have changed the world. They have changed us as individuals. They give us the opportunity to see who we are, where we are going, and where we have been.