Painting with Light: Jessica Fridrich Refuses to be Eluded by Nature

Dr. Jessica Fridrich was born and raised in the Czech Republic during the Socialist regime. It was here that, despite the sterility cultivated by the powers of government, a young Fridrich’s love for the arts and nature began to grow. Much of her early inspiration stems from experiences with her father, who was an electrical engineering instructor at a specialized high school.

“His heart was really in fine arts,” says Fridrich of her father.

She recalls, as a child, watching her father make sketches out in a field, or paint in the living room of their apartment. These were her father’s galleries, as his political views restricted him from showing his art in public. While she observed him, Fridrich’s father would teach her about the principles of art, such as composition and mixing paint.

“It was amazing just to watch him,” she recalls.

As a young girl, Fridrich enjoyed drawing, but she eventually found a fascination for science and astronomy. Even though her passions were evolving, her father’s support remained consistent. This included a father-daughter project of building a homemade telescope. Their working materials consisted of a convex lens found at an optical store, a cardboard tube used to hold rolls of carpet fabric, and some other objects inventively repurposed to create a functioning mechanism. It is an impressive task in today’s world, but it reflects the reality of living in the Socialist Czech Republic.

“In Socialistic economy you couldn’t get anything, not even toilet paper sometimes,” Fridrich shares. “There were strange shortages of things that are [considered] basic goods.”

A few years after graduating from Czech Technical University in Prague, the top-ranked technical school in the Czech Republic, Fridrich came to the United States - to Binghamton, no less. In 1995, she graduated with her PhD in System Sciences from Binghamton University. Today she is a full-fledged professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at BU. She teaches mostly her own research of steganography, which is the art of hidden communication within media. In Fridrich’s case, the medium used is digital photography.

Her research has piqued the interest of many government agencies, most from which she has received grants to further her studies. In addition, Fridrich also works on what is often called image ballistics, a development in digital forensics that she discovered with her team at Binghamton University in 2004. Image ballistics is the photography equivalent of the ballistics method used in investigative forensics. Just like ballistics can be used to connect a bullet with the gun from which it was fired, image ballistics can track a digital photograph back to the exact camera that took the picture. This is done through the examination of the sensor pattern noise (related to light and pixels), like bullet scratches in a gun, which is unique to each camera.

Fridrich and her team developed this technique to detect the sensor pattern noise in a picture and then tie it back to a specific camera. This is not visible to the naked eye, but essentially is broken down on a numerical level. Image ballistics is currently being used worldwide in legal proceedings, such as the prosecution of child pornographers. It has also received many prestigious awards and was even mentioned in the film “Beyond Reasonable Doubt,” in which Fridrich, her team, and Binghamton were also credited.

“[Image ballistics] has caused a true revolution [in law enforcement],” she reflects. “It was really a kind of serendipitous discovery.”

Even before her many career accomplishments, Fridrich set forth to fulfill two of her biggest dreams: buy a big telescope and see the American West. This was inspired by a series of Western-styled European films set in the American West that were, ironically, filmed in former Yugoslavia.

In 1993, two years after moving to the United States, Fridrich made her first road trip out West. She made the four-week trek from Binghamton to the West Coast in a small Toyota with no air conditioning and frequent breakdowns. When returning east, Fridrich realized she had left her heart behind, so in 1995 she took made her second trip to the coast.

“My heart was in the West; this is where I really wanted to live,” she confesses.

For all her desire to move out West, Fridrich’s most promising work prospects remained in Binghamton. Yet, her eastern location did not stop her from taking advantage of opportunities to pilgrimage as much as possible. One year, while on a family trip, a photograph in an Arizona hotel inspired Fridrich to take a new journey. It was a picture of the Wahweap Hoodoos, a magnificent collection of geological forms located near the border of Utah and Arizona. Her fascination with this location eventually drew her to the Paria Plateau, which rests where the two states meet.

This was certainly the road less traveled, as it required off-road vehicles and foot travel to reach. Not being an ideal family destination, Fridrich planned to make the excursion a few years later with her PhD student Jan Kodovsky while in California for a conference. Fridrich spent the two years prior planning, learning to drive in the sand, and consulting her friend Bill Belvin on traveling through desert terrain. In May of 2012, Fridrich and Kodovsky set out on their journey.

“It was love at first sight,” Fridrich describes her trip to Paria Plateau. “I knew that this was something I wanted to explore more. I knew this was something I wanted to portray. I wanted to communicate the beauty in a special way to everybody else.”

Fridrich had always made time to go out and explore on her trips out West, but it was after the Paria Plateau that she started looking at her photography more seriously. However, the subjects of Fridrich’s photographs require much more than fancy camera equipment. There are a number of different factors and elements that must be considered, such as light, exposure, weather, time of day (or night), and time of year - just to name a few. Some shots take up to a year to plan and shoot, but the window of time to collect the right shot is much shorter.

“It’s a brief moment - it literally lasts seconds,” she says.

These fleeting moments are part of the inspiration for the title of Fridrich’s exhibit, Elusive, opening this April at the Brunelli Fine Arts Gallery. She describes that attempting to capture the right moments is like trying to grasp something as it slips through your fingers. It is more than just the lifespan of the moment, but also the lifespan of the subject that makes these shots so elusive in nature. Many of the geological forms in Fridrich’s photographs are constantly changing due to forces of nature and human tampering.

“In geological time,” Fridrich ponders, “[the forms] are kind of elusive themselves.”

Although many of the factors involved in capturing each shot are out of Fridrich’s control, she still finds ways to pull truly mesmerizing scenes from nature. None of her photographs are composites, meaning they are not multiple shots layered upon each other (i.e. the sky from one shot and the rock formation from another).

However, in Fridrich’s case, what you see is not always what you get. She explains that there are things in nature, and in light, that our eyes can see but the camera cannot, and vice-versa. There are many shots that Fridrich sets up that look different through her camera monitor, after the shot, from what she envisioned or even saw with her own eyes. This is particularly true during her many night shots, when Fridrich will set up a shot before sunset and then shoot in almost complete darkness.

“[This technique] is kind of purist, you could say, because I only capture the light that’s available at the moment,” says Fridrich.

Some of the light available to Fridrich is what she carries with her: she uses the technique of light painting with a flashlight. This is the method of shining light - very specifically focused and directed - on her scene to pull out certain colors and influence exposure. Many of these shots are taken in rough terrain, with wildlife and darkness of the desert threatening. Still, Fridrich finds the end results more than worth the risk.

“You don’t believe what you see - it just knocks you down,” she continues. “Your heart skips a beat; you forget to breathe.”

With her exhibit, she hopes not merely to share her photographs with the community, but also to share an experience with those who come to the gallery. Fridrich wants to inspire people to explore nature, and to see not only what is in front of them, but all that could be in front of them if they look through a different lens.

“I don’t want to just take pretty pictures - I want to take stories. It’s really storytelling to me,” Fridrich explains. "I want everybody who looks at a picture to think that they are witnessing something special, that they are witnessing a moment that is not there every day.”

Elusive will open at Brunelli Fine Arts Gallery (186 State St, Downtown Binghamton) on April 7th (First Friday) from 6-9pm. The exhibit will run through its second opening on May 5th (First Friday) from 6-9pm until the end of May. The gallery will also be hosting an interview with the artist on May 6th during the Saturday 12-4pm hours. For more information, questions, or to schedule an appointment, call (607) 772-0485, email info@anthonybrunelli.com, or visit anthonybrunelli.com. Additional work by the artist and information can be seen on her website, jessicafridrich.com.