Conceptual nominee

My work begins with a simple form: a prism built on the proportions of sacred geometry. Placed into landscapes both scarred and sublime, it becomes a temporary structure—an object without function that interrupts and reframes its surroundings.

I use two versions of the form: one that emits light into darkness, and one that reflects daylight back into itself. In both cases, the prism resists fixed meaning, appearing as portal, visitation, or mirror that points the viewer outward into the environment.

The photographs are not fabrications but events: objects in real places, recorded in real time. I wait for the right conditions, sometimes for hours, adjusting the form by inches until light and site fall into balance. Levitation and reflection occur in front of the lens, not in post-production. At a moment when AI images blur truth and invention, this work insists on presence.

The chosen sites carry timelessness and entropy, beauty and human scar. My interventions last only for a moment, but the photograph preserves the trace of that encounter—the meeting of geometry and ground, perception and reality.

Temporary Structures is a way of acknowledging the mystery that lies beyond our senses.

Paul Costello is a photographer from San Francisco, now based in New Orleans. He received a BFA in Photography from New York University and has worked professionally for more than two decades across editorial, commercial, and fine art contexts. His personal practice, Temporary Structures (The Illumination Project), stages mirrored and luminous prisms in landscapes where fragility and beauty intersect. These forms act as interventions that refract light, fold terrain back onto itself, and reframe the viewer’s experience of place. Drawing on legacies of land art and minimalism, Costello situates the work firmly within photography, producing images that ask how human presence reshapes the landscape.

Education
BFA in Photography, New York University, Tisch School of the Arts

Selected Exhibitions
2025 — Temporary Structures (The Illumination Project), Camille Obering Fine Art, Jackson Hole, WY. Solo exhibition of new large-scale photographs extending the project into Western terrains and alpine light.
2024 — Phenomena/Noumena, Voltz Clarke Gallery, New York, NY. Solo exhibition exploring works on geometry and perception.
2023 — Camp Abundance, Dawn DeDeaux’s Camp Abundance, New Orleans, LA. Solo exhibition situating the project within the artist’s experimental site.

Collections
Private collections in the United States and abroad