This one is about me. This winter, in fact since mid-summer, I have been experiencing a sort of existential crisis concerning myself as an artist. I attended a workshop in July that was a pretty negative experience, a disaster really, mostly having to do with the instructor. I partially blame myself as well for the careless way in which I chose the workshop. Not surprisingly, I did meet several very talented and creative photographers at the workshop, but I found the dynamic fostered by the instructor pretty much sucked the life out of most of us. Possibly because of this experience, I realized in the early winter that, with the exception of one studio shoot, I felt completely blocked artistically. I think the experience of that summer workshop was a kind of message from my subconscious that I needed to take this more seriously.

So now as I slowly come out into the light in fits and starts, I am realizing that there is a reason that the phrase 'personal work' contains that adjective; it needs to be personal. It can't be done FOR someone else; that's client work. Nor can it be LIKE someone else's work.

I started my photographic journey before I was even in high school. I was enamored with the work of Penn, Avedon, Ansel Adams, and others of that era. But I was also attracted to 'the process' of making photographs. I was sloppy and careless with my process then, as I was with everything else as a kid, including my schoolwork. But I also recall the enthusiasm and abandon with which I set out to make photographs. I thought that Penn and Adams were about the process too, which to an extent they clearly were. But over time I have come to realize of late that the photographs that they made were about themselves as well. I think the idea that Ansel Adams' work is thought to have been simply about technical perfection of its day, and nothing more, engenders replication that is technically accurate, but lacks the artist himself.

My life as a photographer was on hiatus for much of my life as I pursued two other careers. I don't regret any of it. In fact, sometimes I wonder what kind of photographer I would be now had I been a commercial photographer for those 30-plus years. Re-creating my photographer 'self' as digital photography became real caused me to lose sight of my old 'self' and that old process for a while. I immersed myself in the new technology, including learning to use lighting, much of which either didn't exist or was far beyond my abilities to afford in the early 70s. Once again, it became all about the process. A couple of years ago I started to use film again, first sending my film to a lab, then buying a couple of larger format cameras and developing the film myself. It was still about the process. The process of shooting film though came with a lot of deja vu moments, causing me to think a lot about what my 15-year-old-self was thinking, and feeling.

Somewhere near my house - probably around 1970

Over the last year or so though this process-based photography has been feeling pretty hollow. I need to do more than just make technically good photographs. Probably not surprisingly, over this time I have been trying to make them less so; low-light, grainy images, paper negatives; maybe as a way to shake things up.

Double exposed paper negative - January 2018

If you are my client, the good news is that I am basically a "pleaser". I am sure that it has something to do with my upbringing in a conservative Catholic family and 12 years of parochial school. Layer that on top of an inherently introverted personality and that makes for someone who does not like to disappoint. I will always strive to give my clients what they are looking for. But my personal work has to say something about myself. It's an ongoing project and definitely has it's ups and downs, good days and bad (ask my wife), but I need to feel that the work that I make has substance and meaning for me and that it says what I want it to say.

A few more of my photographs, probably from the early 1970s

Color, light, shadow and texture. The elusive harmony of form and composition. A look, a laugh, or a moment that draws you in. These are the things that compel me. This is why I create images.

I wrote this recently in an attempt to describe how I feel about what I do. What made me think of this was that I had recently photographed a young actor and college student and was trying to come up with a reason to show them off. She and I will be doing some conventional actor headshots for her portfolio, but I also asked her to be a subject for my ongoing Merrimack Valley People portrait project, and those are the shots shown here. In mulling over today's blog I encountered another blog, entitled "Your Artistic Voice - Do You Have One?", which you can read here.

I hope I have a vision and a distinctive style, or as the blog describes, "that work [that] couldn’t possibly have been done by anyone else". I also hope that my short statement at the opening of this post accurately describes it. The other article also says that a style comes from "life experience and mastery of material". In my life, both of these things are works-in-progress. I think if one ever considers either of those things complete, the game is over. If there's no learning going on, things get old pretty quickly, both in terms of the work product and the activity of creating it. One of the things that I like the most about doing a project like this is the ability to experiment, both artistically and in terms of that "mastery of material". I've seen web videos of photographers who tell their audiences that one light goes here, the other one here, and a hair light goes over there, and how they use a length of string to check the distance of each light from their subject so that their setup is identical each time. All together now: yawnnnnnnnnnnnn ..... Even in the studio, where I can control everything, I normally breakdown the equipment after each shoot so that no such boring thing will occur.

Color, light, shadow and texture. The elusive harmony of form and composition. A look, a laugh, or a moment that draws you in.

Whatever I am seeking when I shoot, even if it is something that I've done many times, if I am not stretching, at least in some dimension, I am not growing and am not giving everything I have to my artistic voice. In a commercial photographic setting, the client may think, and verbalize, that they "just want" <fill-in-the-blank>, but giving them something more than that is what differentiates and what results in an artistic vision.

This One is About Me

An Artistic Voice