"Orchard Park" is British photographer Andy Lock's documentation of the vacant rooms in an apartment tower of the same name. The photographs record the time after the tenants had left the complex and just prior to the building's demolition. Lock, who will take the stage at the Dryden Theatre on Thursday, April 16, at 6 p.m. to discuss his work, created the series in 2003, and the resulting images depict empty spaces filled with unique new tenants: the nearly tangible energies of light and imagined memory.

Though plainly readable as camera-made images, the look of "Orchard Park" is not what we've come to expect of everyday photographs. Shadow and light are rendered in a vehement green somewhere between chartreuse and lime, and a soft, pictorial quality pervades the work, with the look of brushstroke underlying every image. The aesthetic of "Orchard Park" owes to Lock's winding photographic process. The images began as "normal" photographs - 35mm slides that he shot in the empty apartments - and what followed was an innovative technique of re-photography. Lock projected the slides onto a surface coated with glow-in-the-dark paint. He created the final pieces by photographing the glowing ghost images that remained when the projector was shut off.

While green is not a shade often admired for its beauty, consider the conceptual heft of this palette choice. This green is alive, the same natural chemical energy as that of fireflies at a balmy summer's dusk. This is a phenomenon of chemistry and light like photography itself, but it is a fleeting radiance. And like the subjects of Lock's images, it will soon exist only in memory. It is a process as metaphorically powerful as it is elaborate.

Little is left in the apartments of "Orchard Park," but what does grace these rooms is a great deal of rich and supple light. Many walls feature what looks like distinctly modernist art pieces, silhouetted collaborations between the sun and the window's shape. Other rooms contain literal beams of light, rays spanning from window to opposite wall in a hopeless structural gesture considering the building's numbered days. Darkness has a monumental presence here, too. Robust contrast lends mass to the shadows, as if the blackness filling the corners of these rooms could be scooped up like a shovelful of coal.

Many rooms are completely barren, their walls, floors, and windows appearing as arrangements of flattened shapes, seemingly unable to host a human presence. While the overwhelming emptiness of these former homes yokes the viewer with a lonesome sadness, it is the things left behind that levy the sharpest sting. Abandoned pieces of furniture are the last remaining residents, and chairs figure prominently in several images. Their anthropomorphic forms - including legs, arms, and backs - trigger imaginative visions of their former owners. One chair's tapered legs meet their own shadow on the floor in a defiant act of rooting: this was the apartment of a man who did not want to leave. Two stout armchairs bask in clean white light, their vinyl upholstery shining. One warily looks our way meekly requesting salvage, while the other sits in a corner, gazing far outside the frame and resigned to its inevitable end. Perhaps their owners wore the same expressions not long ago.

The blazing light that exists outside these windows is disorienting, wavering between spiritual and sinister. The viewer begins to question the reality of this place and where everyone went. Out there, into an endless white void? Thankfully, one image offers a sliver of reassurance that the former inhabitants did not simply pass into nothing. Outside the window, the shape of another building cuts through the gleam, dispelling the notion of Orchard Park as a placeless place. The photo comes at the right place in the sequence, just before the viewer exits the gallery. We remember where we are, and that there is a world beyond these walls.

Good design is invisible, as the saying goes, and more often than not the same adage holds for exhibition lighting. But "Orchard Park" is a unique body of work, and the Eastman House's display is untraditionally bold, creating nearly as much atmosphere as the images themselves. Entering the gallery space is akin to stepping into one of Lock's photographs: the room is pitch-dark, save for the focused gallery lights that illuminate only the artwork. The viewer can see to move about, but there is little ambient light. Bouncing from the glass of each picture's frame, the output of the gallery's lamps becomes rectangles of light on the darkened floor. The result mimics the content: we find ourselves in a darkened room filled with geometries of light while viewing images of the same. It's a deliberate tactic that bleeds into installation art, and purists might see it as a distraction from a proper consideration of Lock's prints. However, for those open to the gallery visit as a complete sensory experience, this is a transporting presentation.

Photography's pioneers were captivated with the images carried by projected light in the darkened chamber of the camera obscura. Both Lock's fascination with sunbeams slicing through darkness and his process of re-photography are nods to the medium's beginnings. And while few, if any, stones remain unturned regarding photography's fascination with the aesthetic power of abandoned spaces, Lock has gone further. "Orchard Park" is certainly a moving elegy for these blank rooms, but it is much more than a simple rumination on the melancholic beauty of emptiness. It is a tribute to light itself.

Photographs by Andy Lock

Through April 26

George Eastman House, 900 East Ave.

271-3361, eastmanhouse.org

Tuesday-Saturday 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Sunday 1-5 p.m., Thursday until 9 p.m.