Film Collaborations with Rod Lamborn

Visual artists Rod Lamborn and Corinna Springer explore perception and the unseen through photography, film, painting, and symbolic language. Lamborn uses kinesthetic camera movement to investigate time and place; Springer translates contemplative and symbolic systems into visual form. Genius Loci brings their practices together in an encounter between image, consciousness, and landscape.

About Rod Lamborn

Lamborn’s 28-year career began in cinematography, documenting conflict and its environments in Chechnya, East Congo, Liberia and Afghanistan. His work has since crossed documentary, fine art and experimental image-making, including multiple film collaborations with conceptual artist Rashid Johnson. His current photographic practice uses camera gesture, natural light and long exposure to create painterly landscapes without a viewfinder, allowing the camera to become a witness to an intuitive encounter with a place.

Rodlamborn.com

What happens when two different visual languages meet to reveal what ordinarily remains unseen?

The films invite the viewer to look again: to realize that the boundaries between inner and outer reality may not be as fixed as they appear.

All three films borrow the accelerated visual language of contemporary media and turn its momentum inward. A tumultuous ascent through landscape, paintings, Hebrew letters, geometric forms and ancient symbols alternates with slower encounters with the mountain, creating tension between velocity and stillness, concealment and revelation.

Forms appear, disappear and return, sometimes too quickly to be consciously interpreted. Echoing the near-subliminal language of advertising and social media, the film redirects that intensity away from persuasion and consumption toward an interruption of habitual perception—an invitation to encounter the familiar and unfamiliar with fresh eyes.

Sound creates a parallel journey. A crystalline melody floats above cicadas and rushing water. Drumming, honoring the Indigenous peoples connected to this land, gradually dissolves into a heartbeat. What begins outside the viewer is drawn inward: seeing becomes sensing; observation becomes participation.

The ascent ultimately becomes a movement inward. Faced with the stark realities of everyday life, can we create a space between perception and reaction in which another response becomes possible? The film favors involution over revolution or revolt: turning inward not as withdrawal, but as a way of meeting the world differently, questioning our learned and inherited beliefs and reactions.

The mountain and the world remain the same; what may change is how we look.

Re’eh, which means seeing in Hebrew, takes this very concept of perception and shortens it to a 13-second clip: asking the viewer if 13 seconds are short enough for a message to be received in today’s era of collective diminishing attention span.

In Return of the Shekhinah, the central message is the transformation of inner light and outer light that, through the artistic process, becomes matter, and even fabric. The tension between the flashing letters and the slow-moving waterfall is meant to create an initiation-like mind frame, where renewal and rebirth can occur.

Credits: Imagery and concept: Rod Lamborn, Paintings and Symbols: Corinna Springer, Music: Patrizio Yoga