Honorable Mention
They're Always Watching Me, No. 1
DESCRIPTION
"They're Always Watching Me" series:My main goal for taking macro/close-up photographs of urban decay is: How do I make the old, ugly, and the discarded look beautiful, strong, and colorful again? And why do I see faces everywhere I look? Who is always watching me? Are they spirits or other worldly beings like the supernatural? Or did the people who originally make these objects – like the steel dumpster, the asphalt parking lot, the metal sign, the traffic road cone, the billboard poster, or even the graffiti tag – transfer their energy source somehow someway into these original objects, and then all of these different human energy sources in all of these different original objects (which have been decaying away on top of each other for years or decades at a time) are now forming into a brand new source of energy / life and that is what we see instead? And how do I properly capture these *new beings* in their true essence, full of color & full of life?
AUTHOR
Spiritography: post-human portraiture where function ends and presence begins.Dave Vescio is a visual artist working at the intersection of photography, metaphysics, and post-industrial material culture. His practice, which he terms Spiritography, proceeds from a single conviction: that spirit is not transcendent but immanent — encoded in the surfaces of rusted metal, weathered glass, corroded rubber, and forgotten infrastructure. His images do not construct this presence. They discover it.
Each body of work occupies a distinct register of the material world. "Interdimensional Beings" / "Interdimensional Cities" captures luminous entities refracted through aged and weathered glass — liminal figures suspended between states, shaped by light, erosion, and atmospheric time. "The Spirits of Route 66" / "They're Always Watching Me" moves into darker territory: close-up encounters with non-human identities encoded in rust, rubber, and the residual marks of American ruin. Together, these works establish a material continuum: from apparition to embodiment — from light-based emergence to surface-based encounter.
This inquiry draws on a lineage that includes Minor White's mystical phenomenology, Alvin Langdon Coburn's vortographic encounter with light through glass, and the cosmological mark-making of Paleolithic cave art — a lineage in which the image has always been a threshold, not a record.
Contact information: https://www.davevescio.com
