I often fuse images together to create photo-composites. These deepen the meaning of moments that may have occurred randomly and apart but together offer a scaffolding to explore ideas, feelings and beliefs.

I also frequently use the camera as a painter’s knife by moving the camera with long exposures, a technique known as Intentional Camera Movement. When moving the camera with long exposures, light becomes fluid, creating blurred and abstract photographic effects. Framing the subject and the movement of the camera determines all.  Perhaps this is a strange use of the camera, using it to paint. Yet light has become the easiest of materials to work and it’s a ready source of beauty. 

I majored in music composition and theory in college and in a way I’m still engaged in composition. My work here is a form of visual music, the upper and lower registers of sound here, light and shadow. I come from a family of musicians and artists. My mother was a watercolorist. My brother John — John Nyerges, Jazz Pianist and Composer — performs extensively in Upstate New York and has produced numerous CDs. His 2008 CD, Jazz, Pictures and Poems, features his work and our brother Paul’s photography, as well as poetry by his daughter, Elissa Portela. Paul is a talented photographer and artist in his own right. My brother Alex — Alex Nyerges, Photography — is a widely exhibited photographer. 

I agree with Virginia Woolf, writing in Moments of Being, “we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.” Whether poetry, photography, or other works of art, they are the phantoms of the mind’s ephemeral machinery in all its complexity and mystery, and as artists, we feel compelled to share them.