Marcie Jan Bronstein has been creating photo-based art for more than twenty years. Known for her unique, hand-colored images and her work with the photographic negative, her prints have been exhibited, published, and collected in the U.S. and abroad. She is the author of three published books of photographs and the creator of a number of large-scale public works. Her photographic images, enhanced with invented color, are whimsical, painterly, and in the words of one critic, 'filled with a sense of power and a tranquil still-life vision.'
Bronstein's fascination with negative imagery stretches back to her early years as a student of photography. 'Examining my negatives, with a loupe on a light table, I felt as if I was glimpsing another very real world. The radiant image that emanated from the film entranced me. It was beautiful and strange, mysterious and surreal.'
Bronstein approaches her photographs as a painter approaches a canvas. By selectively colorizing parts of an image, and combining a black and white world with a versicolored world, the lines between the realms of photography and painting dissolve. Hand-coloring photographs allows for both a meditation on an image and a re-interpretation of that which was recorded initially. In this regard, the photographic image, negative or positive, black and white or colored, is solely a springboard, or a point of departure. With the glowing negative image as a base, her photographs are like light-filled imprints of real (or imagined) memories.
