Artist Statement
I shoot what the eye can not see.
Over time, with extended exposures, film is able to collect the changing light. As light passes across the landscape, the film gathers a composite of light as it travels with time. It is this resulting quality of light that so interests me and which seems to suggest a certain timelessness.
I work solely with historical processes - large and medium format cameras, black and white film, handmade toners and oil paints. In the field, I work in extremely low light situations, searching for that ethereal but fleeting unison of light and landscape which appears simultaneously both representational and symbolic. In the darkroom, I hand print each piece, painting with light to enhance and intensify the image collected on the film.
By seeking subjects that are visually quiet, the quality of the light itself becomes a large part of the subject and the essence of the piece.
Review by Edward J. Sozanski, Philadelphis Inquirer Art Critic, Friday, Nov 19, 2004
Even though photographic technology has metamorphosed dramatically in recent years, manipulation of light remains the medium's fundamental tactic. Light not only delineats content, it sometimes creats it.
Lisa Tyson Ennis of West Chester uses light this way, to transform ordinary scenes in a way that creastes atmosphere and mood, her ultimate subjects. In doing so, she works much like the symbolist artists of a century ago, whose target was less the eye than the imagination.
Ennis's exhibition[s] consists of toned silver prints, mostly landscapes, many of those involving water views. She photographs at times of day when sunlight is relatively dim, which imparts a romantic cast to everything she shoots.
Add to that the pale sepia toning, and a sensation of stopped or blurred motion that suggests time exposures, and you get the archaic look of 19th-century photographs.
You also get a a pronounced feeling of stopped time, not the clarifying instant in the present but the otherworldly sense of looking backward at the past.
Water, which flattens out to a mirror surface in slow or prolonged exposures, is the perfect instrument for generating this time-machine effect. That's apparently why Ennis so often focuses on partially submerged jetties, rowboats at anchor, and large rocks poking out f water.
This kind of photography could easily drift into cliche', but Ennis studiously avoids banality. Her images combine pleasing proportions of naturalism, poetry and mystery, finished off with the soft toning that announces a sidestep out of the real world.
