Leslie C. Wood

Leslie C. Wood

“Capturing a Minute Piece of Reality”

By Robert Hazzon

Leslie C. Wood is a Philadelphia-based artist whose art is expressed in both photography and the written word. She feels that mankind has always searched for ways to express and explain the world, and that while the world was being expressed in visual imagery, it was also simultaneously being expressed in words. “Both use a rich, colorful language, which allows a story to be told, a moment to be captured, and emotions to be experienced,” she explained.

Wood sees her photography as a journey of exploring both the familiar and unfamiliar. “I believe that the only way to understand the unfamiliar is to understand the similarities it has with the familiar, and that understanding or response is different for everyone,” she says.

Wood feels that creative thinkers look at things differently than non-creative thinkers. “Although photography requires technical ability, it’s the photographer’s overwhelming desire to gain knowledge of everything around him/her that makes the difference between an ordinary photograph and an exceptional one,” she says. “Because, as new knowledge is gained, there’s a drive to witness an entirely new form being born. And, for creative thinkers it doesn’t matter if it happens in six minutes, six months or six years; they simply have the faith that it will happen.”

Many artists and nature lovers may have no interest in mathematics, but Leslie finds fascination and enjoyment in some of the parallels between nature and numbers.

“For example,” she says, “often times the number of petals in a flower is one of the following:  3, 5, 8, 13, etc., and those numbers belong to the Fibonacci sequence, where each number is obtained by adding the two preceding numbers. It all contributes to my sense of discovery,” she claims.

Wood’s philosophical approach to photography best explains the essence of who she is as an artist. As she sees it, it’s not the goal of the photographer to change the subject, but for the subject to change the photographer.

Contact Leslie C. Wood at:     lcw@writer4u.com

Or visit her website at: http://www.lesliecarolwood.com