info855623
- Jul 29, 2023
- 2 min read

James O'Mara's "Duets"

welcome to our

SATURDAY EVENING POST

July 29th, 2023

“The duets [series] bring two images together to make a third I feel strongly about creating. Most are culled from observations of design fragments I'm attracted to. The combinations are the result of creating pleasing compositions and colour stories for design reasons that sometimes make sense because of common elements or sometimes don't. I liked the individual images enough to document them but think collectively a bigger impact happens with the juxtapositions.”

— James O’Mara

Duets in progress

Photo credit: James O’Mara

James O’Mara has spent his career creating poetic images that have graced magazine covers and gallery walls alike with his signature high contrast, textural style. It is through his storytelling that O’Mara has been able to toe the line between a commercial and artistic practice, a historically delicate tightrope act for photographers to navigate. Through this dance of genres, O’Mara has arrived at the Duets series, his own take on the diptych format. Unlike traditional multi-panel works, he has taken pairs of images in which he finds visual harmonies and combines them to make a single image.

The harmonies of these pairings support each other through consonance or dissonance, building upon each other through stacked compositions like those of a musical chord. While each image contains their own particular tone and resonance, the resulting combination is greater than the sum of its parts.

For a moment, the images appear as one, finding connective tissue in the interplay of light and colour within. The removal of any space between the images simultaneously highlights their similarities and differences, allowing the viewer to navigate the across the image boundaries unobstructed. It is through this process of discovery that we can join O’Mara in his own explorations of his work, finding beauty in the everyday and the the extraordinary.