ABOUT /
I try to carry a camera with me, a Leica, just about everywhere I go, including for work. Sometimes I can’t bring it along so that’s when I use the iPhone (the color pictures). I don’t use the iPhone unless I can’t use the Leica.
When I take pictures, I am looking for something that I think might make an interesting picture. With the exception of the iPhone photos, I shoot film (Kodak TriX).
Everything is printed full-frame–no cropping. I print the Black and White photos myself. There is no manipulation of what the camera took, though I do try to print them so they’re easy to look at. I am re-printing some of the older photos and will replace them (on the website) with the newer prints.
I think I might get an interesting picture every 500 frames or so. Or maybe it’s 1000 frames to get a picture I think is interesting. I haven’t counted, but these pictures you see here are surrounded in the contact sheets by lots of misses. Pictures I really like, occur only once in a great while. Mostly what I do is miss.
I’m not trying to say anything with these pictures. They’re not preconceived. I don’t have any goal other than hoping to see something visually interesting on the contact sheet. My job is to operate the camera as well as I can.
The process I go through is to take pictures, develop the film, make contact sheets, wait at least two years before looking at the contact sheets, and then make a print of the frames I like on 8X10 inch paper.
I am, unfortunately, influenced by the pictures of other photographers, but I do try to fight that. As much as I love their pictures, I don’t want to copy them. I like looking at pictures, and I try to understand what I am looking at.
I love old pictures and I love the ones taken by persons who I call the great photographers, all of whom use the camera in a straightforward way: Atget, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Helen Levitt, Vivian Meier, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand to name a few.
Garry Winogrand said that he tried to take pictures that don’t look like any picture he had seen before. I adopted that idea as my aim because I could and still cannot escape the logic of that. I have the freedom to try to do it, and I have no one to please, so why not!
I also have friends who take pictures and I love to see what they are doing. I can look at these pictures over and over and for hours at a time without being bored. I have no interest in manipulated pictures.
I asked my friend Nee Nee to make a website for me because people sometimes ask me if they can see my pictures. I picked some out and here they are. I’m no good at digital stuff, but she’s great at it!
Anyway, I hope you enjoy looking at some of them!
All the pictures are copyright 2020. If you want a print, please get in touch and we’ll work something out.
