Carnival Rides Spun into Abstraction
You haven’t really seen a ferris wheel until you’ve seen one photographed by Roger Vail.
You haven’t really seen a ferris wheel until you’ve seen one photographed by Roger Vail. The photographer takes long, nighttime exposures that turn carnival rides into hypnotic whirls of color and light. Some look like ringed planets or spirograph designs, others like practice targets, and still others like glowing, ethereal jellyfish.
Currently on view at the Joseph Bellows Gallery, Vail’s carnival ride photos span four decades of his career. He shot the first one in 1970 using an old view camera and black-and-white film, not really knowing how it might turn out. The trippy, spinning orb he developed in the dark room kept him returning to fairgrounds for years. “The fun of it was that I’d never know exactly what was happening until I got the film back,” he recently told the Guardian. “That’s where the discovery took place.”
It’s strange to realize we can’t see these wondrous patterns with our naked eyes. That might be one of the things that makes Vail’s photographs so fascinating — they illustrate the value of photography in helping us appreciate the beauty that lies just out of plain sight. In a world where cameras can see things we can’t (like DNA) and go places we never will (Pluto), they’ve become our second set of eyes.
Roger Vail: Carnival continues at Joseph Bellows Gallery (7661 Girard Avenue, La Jolla, California) through August 22.
