1973

Looking Back

It was like falling in love. With a borrowed camera and a load of Tri X for ammunition, I hunted photographic quarry beside Manhattan’s East River. Later that week, in a red glow, I watched my first photographic artworks materialize. The year was 1973, and it was love at first sight. One always remembers the first time. The experience led me to a life and a career of image making. Decades past before I once again watched as an image of mine slowly materialized, revealed line by line this time by ink jets. My emotions were indistinguishable from that slow reveal in a developer tray years ago. The anticipation beforehand, and then the excitement and the joy of having creating something beautiful and tangible. It was deja vu all over again that led to a new path. I decided to devote the rest of my photographic life to exploring and printing my own work. 

When years later, I looked back at those images from that first roll of film, I recognized they revealed an intuitive grasp of the foundational variables of photography; light, composition, gesture and moment. For the 40 years in between those two experiences, that gift led to a career on movie sets that began with Woody Allan’s Zelig and ended with Guillermo Del Toro’s Nightmare Alley. My new direction would mean a much smaller audience, but brought with it that joy of making something  beautiful, tangible, and personal. The satisfaction and validation of people hanging my images on their walls is the icing on the cake.

Looking Forward

My new direction means a much smaller audience, but brings with it the joy of making something  beautiful, tangible, and personal. The satisfaction and validation of people hanging my images on their walls is the icing on the cake. On the 1st Page, I quote Gregory Davis Roberts, who speaks of inspiration happening “when  you empty your heart of ambition, purpose and plan; when you give yourself completely to the golden, fate filled moment”. It is a good description of how I work, wandering without purpose or plan, my only ambition to seek and capture golden, light filled moments. I let visual observation and unconscious motivations guide my shooting in order to capture those fleeting instants when light, composition, gesture and moment come together to create something that is greater than the sum of those variables, or the “new fact”, as Winogrand called it. I work without agenda or preconception, taking advantage of one of digitally photography’s singular benefits, the ability to shoot in great quantity at no cost. Some artists work in specific genres, sometimes for life. I never have. Art happens at the moment of capture, but becomes manifest in the editing of all that voluminous imagery. My portfolios do get organized in definable subjects over time as they become apparent to me, generally falling in the traditional genres; portraiture, landscape, still life, etc. Some portfolios I have shot for decades, some only recently as new subjects reveal themselves over time.

I was recently struck by a curator’s description of the works of artist Alex Katz at an exhibition of his. The words resonated with the conception I hold of my own photography. I could not have expressed better what I hope for my own art by substituting a few words. “Taking light and its absence as the central subject, light often becomes an overt compositional presence. Immersed in the atmospheric conditions of a specific time and place, these photographs radiate from an instant of heightened perception-the state of absolute awareness.  Summoning a vision that was sought, a moment that has passed, an image is now suspended forever in archival ink on cotton fibre such that eternity exists from those moments.”