Photographer Kurt Iswarienko has a way with shadows – the clouds that cover a landscape, the darkness of a slightly obstructed face. It is because of this darkness that the light in his images plays so well into the scene. This dance of yin and yang builds a mystery, like walking into a smoke filled room, hazy and vaguely blurred, making the objects that come to view more significant in their sudden clarity.

This cinematic reveal is a skill developed over time through a constant flexing of his artistic muscles, and it has come to serve him well. On a trip in Italy he was struck by the way the overcast light played through the architecture at a train station in Florence, he instinctively grabbed his camera and took the photo that would become the cover of The Calling’s debut album Camino Palmero. This photo is dramatic, angular, with a vanishing point at the direct center of the scene and a triangle of bright blue sky overhead. Grounded in darkness, but lit from the heavens, this image is balanced in both.

Kurt’s portraits often have this same quality, a play between darkness and light, obscurity that gives way to revelation. The numbers of celebrities who have been photographed in this trademark style are legion; U2, Benicio Del Toro, P!nk, Justin Timberlake, Brad Pitt, Taylor Swift, Charlize Theron, Harrison Ford, Leonardo DiCaprio, the list goes on and on. What is it about this style that pulls so many to be seen in this way by Iswarienko’s lens? In the early days of photography, when the art world was still trying to find an identity for this new medium, Edward Weston wrote about what is revealed in a subject by the camera’s lens. “The camera’s innate honesty can hardly be considered a limitation of the medium…it enables the photographer to reveal the essence of what lies before the lens with such clear insight that the beholder may find the recreated image more real and comprehensible than the actual object.”

Each vista, each visage, is a mysterious adventure into something universal, that we and the world we live in are not always glossy and bright. It is our darkness, our struggle, our demons, that create an overarching spirit of nuanced depth. In acknowledging the shadows, the light appears with brilliance.

Instagram: @kurtiswarienko