Timing and a quiet self-confidence are important when I'm photographing
people on the street. I walk around, get a feel for the crowd, and then
pull out my conspicuous, large, hand-held, 4x5 format camera. For me,
the best photographs hold hidden nuances, degrees of subtlety that keep
on revealing themselves with each viewing experience.
Like an animal that circles its dinner, I'm looking for ambiguity and
moments out of context. There is a great amount of luck in
photographing people in public places. Because I am not directing them,
I have to situate myself without being obvious. So I wait and watch for
the surprises - flick of an eyebrow, or slant of a shadow - that make or
break a picture.
As I focus and concentrate on the subjects around me, I often think of
Pieter Bruegel's 16th century Dutch painting, The Wedding Dance, where
something is happening everywhere you look, where underneath the
festivity you find deeper human behaviors. I am looking for that
unexpected theater instant, the ephemeral wisp of smoke.
The discipline is different with inanimate objects. In the studio, setting up
a shoot, I go for playfulness, playing with the light - hard, soft, how it
bounces, or envelopes a piece. Sometimes it takes a couple of days to
build a "set" before I take out the camera. But then, when I'm in the flow,
I'm totally awake. The sheer strength of concentration heightens all of my
senses: my hearing, seeing, the sense of place.
For me, black and white is the first abstraction. I love its rich tonalities,
the shades of gray that occur, and how I have control over the contrast
and lighting during the shoot and in the darkroom. Because it helps me
'see' my subjects better and more coherently, I crop in the actual act of
photographing, filling the picture space with what strikes me as most
important in that moment. Once I'm in the darkroom, where I discover
new surprises, I only stay long enough to print the details of subtlety and
hidden nuances that continue to reveal themselves.
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