Japanese Spring 11, 1/5, 2024, Pigment print, 37 x 47 inches

These dreamlike landscapes were inspired by my recent trip to Japan. I was captivated by the urban atmosphere of Tokyo, where water, flora and fauna coexist with the shiny metal surfaces of civilization. I was enchanted by the shrines, temples, gardens and bamboo forests of Kyoto, and the dramatic beauty of Naoshima in the Seto Inland Sea. Blurring the distinction between painting and photography, my images resist conventional notions of what a photograph should be. Their visual language is one of layering and collage, a fusion of disparate elements that are simultaneously cohesive and contradictory. Within the same image, surfaces are translucent, opaque, three-dimensional, and flat. Color is used both naturally and expressively. Pictorial content is drawn from the natural environment and the constructed world. Central to these dualities is my lifelong engagement with feminism, particularly the struggle against rigid gender roles and the conflicted embrace of beauty, with its capacity for damage. - C.E.

Carol Eisenberg is a fine art photographer whose constructed digital images blur the line between painting and photography, drawing upon the polarities of beauty and decay, the natural and the human-made. Her compositions begin with originally sourced imagery selected from photographs she shoots in the studio or on location near her homes in Maine and Israel and on her travels. The images exist in an abstract realm that unites intentional creation with a fluid, intuitive approach to composition and color.