About the Author
For over 25 years Garin Horner has been exhibiting award winning fine art photography. He is a member of the Royal Photographic Society and has exhibited his work in national and international museums including the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Cranbrook Art Museum, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Fort Wayne Art Museum and the Musee du Louvre, in Paris. He has studied photography with Joel-Peter Witkin, William Wegman and Barbara Kruger. Horner's photography has been collected by museums including the University of Michigan Art Museum, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art and others.
Horner is the recipient of the United Methodist Award for Exemplary Teaching and the Adrian College Creative Activity, Research and Scholarship Award. He has been a featured speaker at the Society for Photographic Education, The Great Lakes Conference on Teaching and Learning, and SoTL (the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) conferences. He has a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Currently Horner is a Full Professor Photography of
Photography and the Director for the Adrian College Center for Effective Teaching at Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan.
Horner authored the Photo Student Handbook: Essential Advice on Learning Photography and Launching Your Career Path, The Photography Teacher’s Handbook: Practical Methods for Engaging Students in the Flipped Classroom, and is a co-author of Teaching Photography: Tools for the Imaging Educator, 2nd Edition, and (all published by Focal Press). His newest book is A Feather on the Breath of Ra: Conversations with an Alchemist on Photography, Light, and Magic.
About the Book
A Feather on the Breath of Ra: Conversations with an Alchemist on Photography, Light, and Magic
George Kingswood "GK" is a fourth-generation alchemist. He is also a photographer ‑ yet unlike the way contemporary photographers use the word “alchemist” as a metaphor for their creative process, GK uses the word the same way it was applied to fourteenth century European explorers of materiality and spirit. He explains how his lineage of alchemy originated during a period of fascination, when the invention of photography coincided with England’s Egyptian revival, the rise of secret societies, and spiritualism. It was then that GK’s progenitor, Abraham Kingswood recognized the inherent potential of photographic “light drawing” as a vehicle for insight into the transformative workings of the cosmos and took it up as the central activity for his “Great Work”.
As part of a research project focused on the Kingswoods and their photographic praxes, this book offers an overview of the family’s nineteenth century magical traditions, theories, and practices and how they continue to be practiced today by GK, the last of the Kingswoods. Also provided, in GK’s own words, is an explanation of his family motto and its relationship to photography: “Ego Video Esse”, which translates to, “I see it into being.” As a result, readers will discover a previously unexplored photo-historical discipline that’s based in ancient Egyptian mysticism, arcane transformative methods, and an in-depth investigation of how light and visual imagery has been used to speed up the process of human evolution.
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Contact
Garin Horner
110 South Madison Street
Adrian, Michigan 49221
photoalchemybook [at] gmail.com