Ellen Balka

I am a photographer and print maker living and working in Vancouver and Whistler, British Columbia, in western Canada.

Artist's Statement
In reflecting on the unique properties of photography Freeman Patterson points out that "when you start to make a photograph, you have an already-existing object in front of your lens." Painters start with an empty canvas"”they create. In contrast, photographers can choose their subject matter and vary their treatment of it, but nonetheless always confront some aspect of the physical world whose existence and character is independent of the photographer and their interpretation of it. Susan Sontag captured this idea when she wrote that "the painter constructs, the photographer discloses." Patterson suggests that while painters and sculptors can doodle or postpone, that photographers must respond to the world and act when the timing or the light are right, and in doing so, "making a photograph is the act of giving permanence to something transient."

For me, making photographs demands an immediacy in engaging in the world, and this engagement, in turn, yields an intensity of experience and emotion. In my photographic work, I seek to give permanence to often fleeting motion while reve...