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WHY I MAKE PHOTOGRAPHS
I make photographs because I love the process. I love how film and sensors capture reality. I suppose this is the same Garry Winogrand saying that he photographs to see how something looks photographed. That sounds like a big joke, but there is a lot of truth that that. Because photographs aren’t reality. They don’t capture reality. They are simply PHOTOGRAPH of reality. I love things that are inherently “photographic” in nature. I love shallow depth of field. I love the narrow range of tones that can be captured, causing shadows to go inky black and highlights to get blown out. I love bokeh. I love grain. I love how wide angle and telephoto lenses expand and compress distance. I love the process of capturing an image that I *know* is a keeper. There’s an excitement that bubbles up inside me when I *know* that I’m in the middle of creating something I’m going to like for more than, oh, a few hours. I love working on an image for hours and then waking up the next morning and finding that I *still* like it. I love the images I make. I don't often hear artists say that, but isn’t the whole point — in life and art — to make something that you love?
There are times that I’ll be staring at a picture on my screen. I’ll know that I like the basic look and feel of the picture, but I’m not sure how to take it to the next level — to make it something really special. I’ll play around with levels and curves and masks and color adjustments. I’ll pace around the room and then see the image from twenty feet away and in a flash I’ll know exactly what I need to do with it. That moment gives me a little jolt of excitement. I feel like I spend the majority of my shooting and processing time not knowing what the hell I’m doing, so when that moment of clarity comes, it’s a nice bit of reassurance that I actually do know what I’m doing at least some of the time.
Part of the process that I love is having an image that’s DONE. Then there’s that moment when I get another little jolt of adrenaline showing it to people and they like it. Or hate it. Either way, it makes me feel like I accomplished something.
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I photograph faces because they are endlessly interesting to me. Notice how young babies who are just learning to see the world, stare and stare and stare at faces. They haven’t been told that it’s rude to stare at someone. They get to do what they want, and that’s stare at faces (at least when they aren’t trying to put things in their mouths). I don’t think we’ve out grown that. I should qualify that. I don’t think that *I’ve* outgrown that. When I see an interesting face, and I see them ALL THE TIME, I want to be able to study that face. Having a photograph of someone’s face makes that possible for me and everyone else who looks at the image.
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I had a photo web site ten years and the tagline was something like “seduced by light.” That’s beyond corny, but it still holds true. When I’m photographing anything besides peoples’ faces, it’s usually going to be the light in a scene that makes me want to pick up my camera, not so much the things that the light is illuminating. It’s more *how* the light is illuminating something that makes me want to photograph it. In that sense, I’m using photography in the most literal sense, because it really is the nature of the light that I want to record.
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GOALS
MAJOR, LONG TERM GOALS:
- 10,000 images (30 year plan)
- make a living as a photographer (commercial, editorial, fine art, educator)
- continue to make images that excite me, take risks, try new things, be creative
- be someone who is totally comfortable asking strangers if I can photograph them
- be confident that I can make an interesting portrait in any situation, regardless of the equipment available to me
SHORTER TERM / CLASS GOALS:
- create a new portrait every day and post on collectingfaces.com
- this implies working on approaching and photographing strangers, which is the main point to making a portrait a day.
- contact potential editorial/commercial clients on a weekly basis (say, 5 per week)
- find professional photo orgs, such as ASMP, and attend a meeting to get a feel for them
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