William Knipscher: Where the Light Goes consists of an exhibition within The Carnegie’s Summerfair gallery as well as a permanent installation located in The Carnegie lobby. Knipscher’s project responds to the interior spaces of the building and adds a new layer of documentation and interpretation to a space that is multi-use and attracts a diverse range of arts patrons, students, and theatre-goers.

Over a twenty-year career in photography, Knipscher has methodically built a practice that is increasingly experimental and inventive in its approach to generate a photographic image. In his most recent body of work, Where the Light Goes, Knipscher forgoes any semblance of traditional image-making.

Photography, both traditional and digital, is fundamentally an effort to capture light in order to generate images. Knipscher reduces that process to its basic elements, generating a manually-produced light-based image—a direct document of light on paper. Knipscher uses light-sensitive paper, making repetitive origami folds, which he then exposes. He then unfolds the paper and fixes the resulting image. Recreating the same photograph over and over using manual means is an attempt to re-humanize the act of image-making and to commemorate the act of making through variation.

Though the images created using this process are evocative and resemble abstracted interiors, they are essentially objects that directly document the action of light bending across and around surface variations. The result is a simple object that belies more complex meditations on the nature of the photograph and how an image is made.