Jon Horvath’s ​‘Wide Eyed’ is a dose of clean air in the lungs. His photographic archive is like an evening walk, holding out many quiet delights and plenty of space to breathe. ​‘Wide Eyed’ is bound together more loosely than most contemporary photographic projects, and I like this about it. The collection consists of single photographs, made gradually over the past decade, which fit together more by Horvath’s particular way of seeing than by any continuous concept or narrative.

Sometimes fantastic images happen, and they won’t fit squarely into a project, but neither will they be ignored. I suspect many career photographers can relate. What to make of the in-betweeners? {See Joe Johson’s Other Pictures} An undervalued potential exists in a good collection of distinct single images. Viewers are free to sit with each image on its own terms, or to wind them together at their leisure. When a person chooses a print to live on their wall, it is more often a single picture than a series, and in this context, most of its viewed life is on its own terms.

Horvrath’s series title suggests the fresh and earnest sight of youth. As an artist grows, gains visual literacy, travels deeper into art history, bears the heavy knapsack containing all the compounding cares of adult life, perhaps encounters success… it can become much harder to access a pure and responsive way of shooting. But a project with few parameters and no set end invites the ingenuous sight of the artist to keep blooming.

Horvath points often to the sky, to the window, the uncanny, the light on a trashcan, plants creeping through slats. He’s our tour guide on a pilgrimage to slow down. In his words, “…the project embraces the act of photographic wandering, seeking moments of discovery and identifying parallels between seemingly unrelated events.” This act of roving is what draws so many souls into the medium. Photographic wandering can be a free and awakened state, a way to move through the world in open-ended expectation and alive to discovery. Horvath’s ​‘Wide Eyed’ grants permission to stay awake, to love the world.

– Lisa Woodward

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