Pill Bottles
Five years are not a career, it’s barely even the beginning of truly learning a craft. All I can is after five years of learning, I know marginally more than when I started. So, I sat down and pulled twenty photographs from each year since 2009 and the genesis of my education and practice to see where I began and where I am now. Over the next few weeks, I am going post them, five at a time and talk a little about the photos. We being with Pill Bottles.
One of the first thing a new photographer does is experiment with their camera. This mean going about taking photos of odd things in odd places. There is usually little rhyme or reason to the images and most of them suck. Pill Bottles is no different, I was at work late one evening, playing my new camera and opened a drawer full of orange pill bottles. I took several shots, using the camera’s pop up flash. (A profound faux pas!) The images were kind of cool but nothing special, an exercise in settings on the camera. Ironically, this photograph stands tied for the single highest paying sale out of my entire body. One Magazine paid very well for the rights to publish, and I am not even sure they did.
Vanity
Where to begin with self portraits. Unless you have children or a VERY understanding spouse, most new photographers have only the one model: themselves. Let me be clear, self portraits are different from “Selfies”. (An inane term I long to see confined to the linguistic dustbin of history.) Self portraits say something about how you see yourself, a “Selfie” is just says you see yourself, no introspection or understanding, just vanity. Over the years, I’ve done several self portraits and they are universally done in black and white and usually show me doing something self-destructive.
The Street
It didn’t take long for me to develop an interest in Street Photography as a genre, though I don’t classify myself as a “Street Photographer”. (Best to avoid labels in life, do what you like and stop worry about what people call it.) This woman, I still don’t know her name, lives in my neighborhood. She is developmentally disabled and wanders the street during the daylight hours. Sadly, I’ve watched her grow progressively worse over the years. Where she once seemed cognizant and connected with reality, I’ve watched her slip to the point of walking about removing articles of clothing. The neighborhood once moved to care for her, now with an influx of gentrifiers and money seem to either ignore of treat her as a scandal. I stopped taking her photo as she slowly grew worse, I simply won’t capitalize on human suffering, particularly when I am not even decent enough to learn her name.
The dance
Fairly early on, I realized the focus of my photography is basically Solyent Green. (IT’S PEOPLE!!!!!) I am not a social person, I have a small group of friends and like to keep my life fairly contained within them. Still, my fellow human beings fascinate me, I find them compelling. I learned the best way for me to work with this fascination is within the confines of the large public event, this photo is from the New York City Dance Parade. The Dance Parade also introduced me to another passion, photographing dancers of every kind and style. There is something about the art of dance, dedicated to motion and stopping that motion, capturing just a single instant of that energy that became a recurrent theme.
The People
And if you want to find interesting people to photograph, New York City does the job. Certainly, there are fascinating characters on every corner of America and someday I would like to devote my time to finding them. For now, I have an entire city full of characters to document. My good friend Blackwolf the Dragonmaster will appear again in The One Hundred. After all, if your town has an unofficial Wizard and protector from dragons, how can you not take the time to document his work?