Malone Mills - Frank Pictures Gallery

Malone Mills Photography

Yellow night
2006
Chromogenic prints
35” x 44"

For the past year I have been attempting to photograph orbs at night. What exactly are orbs? It depends who you ask. Ghost Hunters or practitioners of the paranormal might tell you that orbs are a place memory, or haunting phenomena. Some people say seeing orbs is a way of experiencing ‘ghosts’, or that they are a separate life form. Some people think they are energy ‘building blocks’ used by spirits or nature spirits themselves. Orbs often appear as a floating ball of light. Usually they are quite fast and follow an erratic flight pattern. They can vary in brightness. Some are phosphorescent and perceivable to the naked eye, while others are dim and barely visible on film. They can be transparent, semi-transparent or solid. They can be round, oval, or uneven. But if you were to ask me, ‘what is an orb?’ the simple answer is, ‘I don’t know’. What it comes down to is this: No one really knows for sure. There are many cases where a person will try to photograph an apparition and the developed photograph will instead show an orb. These photographs were taken outside my home in Los Angeles over a period of one year. Except for changing the color and the intensity of the photographs in iPhoto, I used no digital manipulation, no Photoshop or any other technological, digital or lighting or camera-based process to capture the orbs themselves. I simply photographed throughout the dark night and this is what showed up on the film.

Blue \ Pink night
2006
Chromogenic print
44” x 35"

I see a lot of photography, but it is rare to see something entirely new. What struck me first about Malone Mills' Night Orbs was its scintillating beauty, but what captured me was the startling singularity of Mill’s vision. These photographs are a provocation, a mystery unsolved, a question asked. Realism conscripted to do metaphysical work. They allude to many disparate artists, times and influences: Julius Shulman’s architectural photographs, the flatness of Ed Ruscha’s seductive landscapes with his unmistakable Southern California iconography floating against the barely defined surface, the spirit photography of Julia Margaret Cameron and the turgid circles of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. And yet these photographs are unlike anything you have seen before, the unmistakable signature of the only person on the planet who sees things quite this way: the triangles and squares of Mills' Cliff May house in relationship with the circles defining the night sky surrounding it, the fuzzy, almost fur-like light, the quasi religious feel of the church-like structure. Are the orbs manifestation of an uber-natural energy these pictures ask, the dialectic between the unknowable and the perfectly described.

Laurie Frank

The veil
2006
Chromogenic print
44” x 37.5"