About

Founded by Jacques Barbey and Wayne Rainey, two professional photographers, Bokeh is a gallery which showcases the best and brightest image makers in the field today and gives them an opportunity to share  their most personal and intimate bodies of work .

Mixing contemporary imagery with either traditional analog and digital technologies, the history of photography is always evident in the gallery’s holdings.  Located in the arts district of downtown Phoenix in the MonOrchid building.

About Our Name:

“The term originally comes from the Japanese word boke (暈け or ボケ), which means “blur” or “haze”, or boke-aji (ボケ味), the “blur quality”. In photography,  bokeh is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or “the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light.” Differences in lens aberrations and aperture shape cause some lens designs to blur the image in a way that is pleasing to the eye, while others produce blurring that is unpleasant or distracting— “good” or “bad” bokeh, respectively Bokeh occurs for parts of the scene that lie outside the depth of field.  source: wikipedia

Our Mission:

To preserve and promote the art and craft of photography amidst the creative tension that coexists between the edges of analog as well as digital image making. Our Focus is simple, steadfast and like our namesake, recognizes the need of balance and value of both techniques, Bokok’s mission is about upholding the art form in the current climate of technological change, a physical space whose venue  striving to humbly maintain the virtue of the craft and the art of photography  while making and showcasing the work that intimates the true, good and beautiful in an arresting image taken out of the flux of time. We are all image-makers and through this acknowledgment  our goal is not just of promotion but one more of vocation, to act as stewards bearing  the invitation to take-in and behold the amazing talent of our fellow imagemakers, colleagues and comrades who ‘carry the fire’ and where as observed through out their work  each preserves the discipline of photography as evinced through their art,there in a single image written in light- a photograph,  where beauty convenes and culminates with the announcement of two words, come see.