BIO

Lukia Costello grew up in upstate New York. She received her BA from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1996 and returned to continue her studies from 2003 to 2004. She has shown photography in several shows in Buffalo, New York, Northern California, Brooklyn and Rochester, NY. She has numerous publish credits as well as one broadcast credit. She is currently working on expanding her portfolio and experimenting with a mixed media process involving alternative uses of photography.

ARTIST STATEMENT     view artist'resume/CV here

My images portray shapes, contours of light and shadow, the interaction of colors and contrast. I am unconcerned with usual context, use or meaning of an object or a scene I have captured. It is interplay of elements in a scene that I find captivating. This visual aesthetic has been with me since I was a child. It’s nothing new for me to be completely absorbed by the shadows in a hall or the way the light plays in a cup of tea.

In photography, the task of describing your work is especially difficult. How do you assign words and concepts to something that begins without either? I walk out the door and I shoot what I am drawn to – end of story. Certainly, there are times where I will physically adjust items in a scene but, in the majority of my work, the act of composition lies solely in framing.

Henri Cartier-Bresson expressed it best when he said: ‘Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It's drowning yourself, dissolving yourself, and then sniff, sniff, sniff – being sensitive to coincidence. You can't go looking for it; you can't want it, or you wont get it. First you must lose your self. Then it happens.’