Welcome to my blog. Anyone out there reading this, I thank you. This website and blog are an interface for me, a place to act and react to the world of photography. A public journal. Ruminations on 30 plus years of involvement with the medium. A place for me to post thoughts and ideas about photography, the pursuit of the image and the gift of involvement. I will also feature images by others that inspire me to think, create and be a better photographer and person.
I learn something everyday about photography. It is a miraculous invention akin to fire, the wheel and the printing press, this profound ability that we have to image ourselves, our lives and our environment, to create both fact and fiction. Photography is my life. I understand how people fall in love with photography. I did 30 plus years ago. I don’t care that everyone is a photographer these days. I only care that I have gotten to be one. That said I feature this image: a self portrait made outside my front door. I photograph what lies before me. Sometimes I make it up, invent it and alter reality. Other times, I am true to reality. This image reflects that: I was looking for a picture due to a need to make one at that moment, camera in hand and good light, outside my front door. Images are everywhere.
My Grandmother, who quit school after the sixth grade, was a remarkable photographer. She had an eye and she had the desire to take photographs, a need, despite hard times, no money, a stark life full of hard work, many children, and a loveless marriage. Yet she always had her camera. So I dedicate this blog to her, even though she was mostly unhappy, I know that photography made her happy. I imagine her on the farm, 75 miles from the nearest town, waiting for the mail to arrive with the newest roll of developed film with prints. It must have been one of those moments when everything else fell away, all the chores and work and stress while she looked at the images she had made months before. I know she felt joy at that moment. She once told me that there is always a picture to be made. The photograph below is of my father, out in the field with a chair. It is a perfect moment, his hand hovers above the horizon, his expression is serious, nothing else exists at that moment, just him and her, the chair, the empty horizon, the breeze, the smell of the grasses. She must have carried that good chair all the way out into the field, camera and boy in hand just to make this photograph and I have loved it for many years. It is the most important thing to make a photograph when the need makes itself known, when the recognition takes place.
ADDENDUM/UPDATE: As a toddler, my father was reluctant to learn to walk and it must have been frustrating for my grandmother on the farm with a two year old who did not walk. She took several pictures of him (without the chair), and left him in a field to make his own way back to the farmhouse. I don’t think he has walked yet before this photograph was made. I hope it did soon after.I love the stories photographs create and how there are so many worlds inside one image. Five years since I started this website and am happy to report I still love photography. I am still learning and still making photographs
