Made and assembled in Belgium, but reprogrammed in California.
Although no stranger to photography since early childhood, I’ve been photographing solo as a calling since 2007, after playing assistant for a photographic artist.
I’m always looking for beauty expressed by energy, forms, light and raw emotions.
The journey to photography as art wasn’t the most straightforward one.
I started out as a composer/conductor by training, dabbled in painting and performance art but spent a lifetime as a technologist and self-made inventor in cutting edge technology fields, covering a variety of medical, industrial, entertainment and home defense applications.
Laser and light special effects in music performance, movies and entertainment installations brought me to Los Angeles, California in 1991, where exposed to brilliant talent, I developed the ability to see beyond the surface.
I don’t photograph subjects but I photograph the way they make me feel and how this translates into a visual story.
My art has been called cinematic, quiet, emotional, dramatic, intimate …
I’m currently based in Stockton, California but I have the privilege to work all over the world with great teams. I also love to photograph the landscapes in the East and the West, mostly attracted by desert and large rock formations.
In my spare time and as budgets permit, I’m converting a Stockton historic firehouse, built 1906-1908, into a gallery, studio, darkroom and meeting space for the creative photographic art community.
I work in digital 35mm and medium frame digital. I’m equally at home in analog film technology, from 35mm roll film up to 8×10 sheet film.
When I’m not active in art and technology, I tend to write about the things that interest me.
As such, this Joel Pahl Dardis blog is a congruence of my interest in human condition, technology, local history, photography, and ancestry.
Cheers !
Rudi Amedeus Blondia
Finding Joel Pahl Dardis 