Robert Kawika Sheer

"Three Hawaiian Spirits in a Lava Tube, " Photograph by Robert Kawika Sheer

2003

Robert Kawika Sheer was born in Anaheim, California, and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. He fell in love with photography as a high school freshman at Oahu’s Punahou School.

In 1981, Robert attended Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, where he studied photography and earned a Bachelor of Communication Arts in 1985. Over the next 15 years, he developed his mastery of photography by taking various advanced photography classes at Santa Monica College. On an excursion to the Mojave Desert in 1999, Robert discovered the “Spirit Shadow” technique that soon had his fine art photographs hanging alongside the works of Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, and Rembrandt.

Robert’s pictures are all performance-art photographs; no digital manipulation or multiple exposures are used in their creation. They’re all taken at night with long single exposures lasting from 45 minutes up to six hours using a large-format 4 x 5-inch view camera. After Robert opens the shutter of his camera, he enters the frame of his picture (sometimes accompanied by his wife Ingela) and becomes a performer within the scene. Because he is using low-intensity moonlight to slowly illuminate the nighttime scene, he is able to journey in front of the camera without the negative being able to record his movement.

In order to make it possible for you to see Robert’s presence in the form of a “Spirit Shadow,” he carries a small portable lighting device hidden in his hand and stands facing a wall. He quickly creates a circle of bright light on the wall and partially blocks the bounce of this light trying to reach back to the camera with his body. The result is a black silhouette surrounded by an illuminated aura. Over the course of the lengthy exposure, the moonlight makes the black silhouette translucent while it brightens the entire scene. Since the negative can’t see him moving around, once he creates one “Spirit Shadow,” there’s nothing stopping him from creating more “Spirit Shadows” on the same negative. As far as he knows, Robert is the only photographer in the world performing this style of photography.

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