Magic Eye: We Can’t Stop Staring at Peter Brown Leighton’s Bewitching Photos

_{Photo Méthode Gallery
2832 E Martin Luther King Jr Blvd #107
July 13 – August 26}

Peter Brown Leighton’s photos arrest the viewer like a Flannery O’Connor short story. A woman in curlers, holding a miffed Chihuahua, stares provocatively from the couch. A man in coveralls proudly displays a taxidermied wildcat, baring its teeth at the camera. But Leighton’s photos share something else with O’Connor’s oeuvre: his seamlessly spliced analog photos are works of pure fiction.

As a young man, Leighton was trained as an analog photographer but grew into the digital age of imagery in the late 80s. His new exhibition, “Live Snakes,” at Photo Méthode Gallery, showcases Leighton’s delight in bridging the divide between analog photographs and digital technology. With Photoshop, a digital tablet and analog photographs from the early 20th century, the unique work showcases fictitious photographs with an uncanny power to both skew and echo daily reality.