Shudder Bug : Anaheim Photographer Employs a Variety of Light Sources to Create Often-Haunting Color Images

John Hesketh’s photographs can give you a very eerie feeling.

By day, the 34-year-old Anaheim resident puts together audio-visual slide shows for conservative Orange County businesses.

But by night, he creates strikingly bizarre color images, using light sources that range from fluorescent fixtures and late-model television tubes to camp-store flashlights and open fires.

Using a 1950s Speed Graphic press camera mounted securely on a bulky tripod, he leaves the shutter open for time exposures of more than an hour as he walks in and out of the area framed by the lens, using his various light sources to illuminate--or “paint”--various props.

The different kinds of light leave different imprints, or “strokes” (he uses a laser light to do fine detail work). He varies the colors by using different filters.

The props themselves tend to be simple things: an old ladder, a white picket fence, a rusty blue chair. But the 16-by-20-inch prints that result can be unsettling. One of the most graphic shows a face (actually one of Hesketh’s neighbors) in a deathly pose, partially covered by a white cloth, “emerging” from a dark green pool table.

“The images come off more threatening than they really are,” Hesketh insists. “When you get close to them, they start to soften up. You can start identifying with them.”

(He also said he has found that people gain more appreciation for the work once they realize that the images weren’t created in a darkroom, but right in front of the camera.)

Still, he continues, “I’m really surprised by how people are affected by them. Or what people bring to the pieces. They bring a lot of their own experiences to them. In fact, they will actually interpret things into them that I have never thought of.”

Not that hidden meanings are never intended.

“Ascension,” one of several works on view at the Cypress College Photo Gallery through Sept. 15, is a ghostly image of a wheelchair with an empty pair of red shoes and a series of feet making their way to a ladder. A shadowy figure lurks in the background.

“ ‘Ascension’ came out of an inspiration where I had the passing of an aunt who was basically like my grandmother,” Hesketh said.

“I had stored her wheelchair away at my home. In one of those moments of trying to figure out things to do, I pulled out the wheelchair and ladder.”

He already had done some preliminary work involving the idea of feet going up a ladder and had come to think of it in terms of death and ascension.

“People see the wheelchair (in the finished work) and say they have relatives who are wheelchair-bound and that’s the only way they are going to walk through this passage of death.”

Another ghostly image at Cypress is “Self Portrait,” a simple chair that, when starkly lit from above, takes on the appearance of an electric chair. Hesketh used his light source to “paint” his arms and feet into the image.

Hesketh’s work is not without humor, however. He takes pokes at suburbia with such pieces as “A Visit With the In-Laws,” which shows a patio chair, a barbecue and two old-model television sets, and “Anxious Flamingo,” a view of a bright pink flamingo poised in front of a white picket fence.

Still, let the viewer beware.

“Dangerous Images,” a collection of photographs by John Hesketh, remains on view through next Friday at the Cypress College Photo Gallery, Technical Education I Building, 9200 Valley View St., Cypress. Hours: 8 a.m to noon Friday, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday. Admission: free. Information: (714) 826-2220, Ext. 244.

Seven new works by Hesketh will be included in the “Outside Influences,” an exhibit opening Thursday at the John Thomas Gallery, 602 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, and continuing through Oct. 28. Hours: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Admission: free. Information: (213) 396-6096.