When he was just 17, New Hampshire-based photographer Paul Wainwright took a high school physics class and he was inspired by some of the photographs, by Berenice Abbott, found on the cover as well as inside the book. Since then and throughout his careers, he has worked to develop a creative painting with light technique to capture beautiful, abstract images in this series entitled Pendulum Project.
Each large-scale black and white photograph is produced with an LED light attached to the bottom of a large pendulum that swings and sways throughout a designated space. Wainwright sets everything up in his barn because the dimensions of the pendulum are quite large, moving across a 12-foot range.
To capture each shot, the artist lays on the ground to focus his camera upward towards the roof. He releases the pendulum, hanging overhead, from a fixed point with a remote control and then uses long-exposure photography to document the unpredictable motions as the pendulum traces out a particular path. The crisp, bright white light is set against a clean, dark black background and the abstract patterns that are captured are mesmerizing arrangements of overlapping lines and curves.
