My name is Mark Lewensohn. I've been making images for as long as I can remember. Even day camp as a second grader included a Kodak camera. No flash, just film cartridges. Back then, every image had to capture a memory or moment in time. This was the mid-1970s. The negatives are gone, the pictures unfound for decades. The family house was sold and I got a box. A box filled with pictures and other items that had fallen meaningless.

There was a rather large gap between the 1970s and the mid-1990s. Twenty years — and signing up for a continuing education class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The single thing that hooked me was the description of the class taking place in the classrooms and actual photo lab of SAIC. Oh the possibilities. What was once a small moment in time during the collective initial thirty years of my life was now open to exploration on a gigantic scale. I could create using film. Medium format film. Medium format color positive film — otherwise known as slides, transparencies.

Spending hours in Central Camera on Franklin Street — across from SAIC itself — gave me the perspective I needed in learning about film and paper. I had to find the perfect photo lab to process what I created; Gamma Photo it was, Helix too. My classes and lab were located in the actual Art Institute of Chicago museum building, inside a student-used wing along South Columbus Drive in Grant Park. My ability to see color — colors that are there and colors that aren't there — capturing time in a single frame — was built from thousands of hours in the color lab, working images the way they'd been worked for decades before.

When the lab shut down due to a shortage of chemicals used for processing film and paper exposures, it was not perceived as devastating. Rather, it created a break between the dying analog days and the future — the digital era. With my lowly Canon point and shoot doing only so much with such a small sensor, I took a break from making creative imagery beginning in 2008. I fully converted to digital at the end of 2016. Those intervening years gave me time to do other things while the technology kept getting better. I now capture all of my art using a sensor producing 24 megapixels. I only use raw files, with a minimal amount of post processing.

I think you'll see what you want to see in my images. You will be your own creator within the art you are viewing. I think my images will make you feel a certain way. Some of what you are seeing is so brilliant and beautiful, you will start to think about being inside the image. Have fun and enjoy the art. They are all one of a kind.