Lassitude and Longitude

Early interest in photography

I grew up poor. I was a free lunch kid and part of the ‘Coat-A-Kid’ program that provided low-income families with clothes for the winter months. Weekends were usually spent with my mother, scouting out rummage sales and sifting through other’s orphaned possessions. My first camera was the Polaroid One-Step. I was six years old at the time, and discovered the camera near the bottom of an antique latch-trunk filled with old issues of TIME magazine and vintage cookbooks. Rarely did my mother ever allow for purchases impertinent to necessity – clothes, shoes, school supplies. So, it was a memorable event marked by exception; one that stayed with me for sentimental and nostalgic reasons but now one that stands distinct as a pivotal point in the development of who I am today.

I grew up with an abusive father and a delinquent mother. For me, photography was my alternative to running away. It provided a window into a world that was free of tumult and chaos. I could crop and leave out the things that seemed to distract and diminish – the dismaying evidences of indigence and incompleteness. As a child, photography was about subtraction and deconstruction, but above of all, it was about escape.

As an adult, photography still serves as a refuge of sorts. I still hold the belief that image has the uncanny ability to transform the banal into the beautiful, the ordinary into the enigmatic. The world is simply more intriguing as represented in images. But above all, image reserves a place where we can associate freely without having others police what we believe. Though our relationship with subject matter may forever be influenced by a social value system and moral dictation, the vehicle of image remains unregulated by this authority. Image in some ways renders us all equals – not only its subjects, but also its viewers.

The winning image

The photo ‘apocalyptic summer’ was an image made in Rochester near the end of summer in 2006. While driving around in the city I observed a group of young children playing in a fire hydrant and wanted to make an image using subject matter that is often represented in a very typical fashion. Instead of contributing to the perpetuation of this subject’s ascribed sentimentality, I chose to subtract and isolate the subject from its context and make my image at an awkward moment of digression. The retreating gesture of the child combined with the sublime beauty and chaos of a scene abstracted by its stillness portends or implies rather, a consequential peril and undermines the playfulness otherwise, classically, associated with photographs of children playing in the rain or under the cool canopy of a geysering fire hydrant.

My approach / style / philosophy

Making images is a very unnatural thing. As image-makers we re-present something already present in the world. We don’t take (as in taking photographs) we re-present and subsequently replace what already is. What we do is completely irrational when you stop to think about it.

I consider myself an existentialist whose intentionality as an artist is fraught with contradiction. I hold firmly to the belief that man creates his own purpose and that meaning is owed entirely to construction —it is an arbitrary advent of consciousness. The contradiction begins with having any intention/s if, in fact, it is my belief that all intellectual contributions are equally arbitrary and meaningless.

This is not an attempt to obfuscate my motives or evade the apprehension of my audience. I find myself equally perplexed and confined within the shrinking space of my own incredulity. I am beset with beliefs that undermine my artistic passions and impulses. I attempt to make sense while all the while I am mocking sense-making.  I use a constructed system of language and meaning to apprehend an existence that is entirely owed to construction. The cycle of contradiction is endless. My work for example, is never conceived for the purpose of telling my audience anything at all. The intention of my work is not to wipe away obscurity but to contribute to it.

Since winning the contest

Since winning the contest not much has changed. I wish I could report otherwise and say that doors began to open and my client list grew exponentially. I would say that the award and recognition has contributed to my credibility and prominence as an artist but mainly within the eyes of other artists. It occurred to me recently that as artists we recognize award and publicity much like the honor and distinction of being Microsoft’s Future Pro Grand Prize Winner, but those outside the profession and craft place little value on which contest you won or what trade magazine your image appeared in.

Photography is perhaps one of the most difficult professions for an artist to achieve distinction among his or her colleagues. Our culture is so absorbed with celebrity and fashion that unless your client list includes recognizable Hollywood names or overly campaigned brands, you’re just another photographer. I thrill at this challenge. To me, it provokes me to push the limits of my own ideas and to find alternatives to overcome the predominance of the mediascape. In photography you can either pander to the market’s extrinsic demands or you can remain faithful to your own interest and create your own market or niche, but I’m sure this is true for any profession.

What am I doing now in photography?

Recently, I traveled to Paris, France and Madrid, Spain to shoot travel and stock photography for the company that represents my work, agefotostock.com located in Barcelona, Spain. I still photograph about 30-45 weddings a year throughout the US, which accounts for most of my business revenue. In May of this year I signed a three-year contract and began shooting as the exclusive photographer/art director for an emerging athletic apparel company, Rylan Blue. I shoot for the George Eastman House here in Rochester as well as the Greater Rochester Visitors Association. I continue to pursue my own personal work, everything from street photography to digital collage and presently I’m developing two photography books I will seek to have published in the Fall.

Advice to others

I would advise others to shoot everyday. Photography is or should be an addiction. Obsession is imperative for success. I could say something cliché like never give up, but I think giving up is often crucial to the process. Push yourself to failure and if you wake up one morning without a single image in your head that you feel you must make, go back to bed.

Recent Awards

I won first place in Portraiture and Product photography in the CPI (commercial photographers international) P3 competition. Also, I was recently notified that my series ‘Myopic Provincia’ was selected for the semi-finals in Adobe’s Design Award Contest.

The camera warrants a sense of adventure that makes it possible for me to escape and reinvent my world using image to capture, control, and reconstruct it. This all began for me at the age of six, when my mother bought me a Polaroid instant camera from a neighborhood rummage sale. My parents were too poor to afford the film, so I was content with activating the flash and pretending to make photographs.

Those who have inspired and informed my work range from Diane Arbus, Helmut Newton, Josef Sudek, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, to Rineke Dijkstra and David LaChapelle. I am infatuated with portraiture and series work. Ultimately, I would like to pursue, exclusively, portraiture series predicated on themes of identity and typologies resident within American pop culture. I love to straddle the fence between that heavily debated ‘fine line’ that separates fine art photography from commercial photography; working to diffuse and disrupt those boundaries even more so. As an artist I would like to impact and offset the boundaries within the symbolic structure and visual marketplace.

People often ask me about ‘taking photographs’. I don’t consider what I do taking, in the sense that something is being removed or reclaimed. Even at the pre-conceptualization stage, the very act of imaging, making a photograph entails construction. Whether a photographer is patiently anticipating that ‘decisive moment’ or whether he or she controlling every single aspect and element of a photograph, there is preconception, previsualization if you will. Even spontaneously made photographs, shot from the hip don’t happen without causation; they happen out of response. In that sense, photography is never an act so much as it is a reaction I consider myself an image-maker, not always clear on what I am reacting to, but definitely aware of that relationship. As image-makers we create something that does not exist, we re-present something already present in the world. What we do is entirely irrational when you stop to think about it.

On the other hand, photography allows us the ability to find and make meaning where perhaps none exists at all. It allows for play and possibility, discourse more importantly, not for the purpose of reforming our world, but so we can more clearly see ourselves and learn something of who and what we really are. Photography is a trap, it promises truths but, through an examination of its problematics, it reveals how impossible and unlikely the existence of truth ultimately is. I find the most inspiration in this web of complexities and elusiveness.

I try to make photographs every single day – even if it’s only with the make believe camera in my squinched right eye. I am obsessive and compulsive about needing to image my world. It has, at times, proven to be an alienating characteristic of my personality and at other times, a testimony to my tenacity as an artist and a visually ‘sensitive’ individual.

The photos that stick with me from my childhood are those indelible photos that act as icons, such as Eddie Adams’s photo of a Vietcong prisoner being executed or photos of an entirely opposite genre such the photo of Marilyn Monroe with her skirt blown upwards by a street vent. To me, images all have an inestimable value, I don’t necessarily discredit the value of one in contrast to another since we often see what we want to see and make meaning, indiscriminately, out of anything.

However, there are those photos, such as the one’s I described in the afore that reflect society, not with intention or purpose to reform it or critique it, but to hold it up so that we may all look at it for the purpose and awe of understanding. Photojournalists impress me greatly, but celebrity and fashion photographers can, at times, effect me similarly. Ultimately, any photography that refuses to critique stereotypes with the construction or perpetuation of more stereotypes gets my vote.

At my core, I’m a portrait photographer, a hunter/gather of forms, faces, and expressions. I am most interested in vulnerability and rare moments of discontinuity in which defining moments materialize and disintegrate almost simultaneously. For me, this is what photography is all about, specifically portraiture. Interaction with strangers through an image capture device changes the dynamic of an already ambivalent relationship. It is crucial that the photographer be improvisational not only on a technical level, but his or her spontaneity should also extend to the persuasions necessary to gain the momentary trust of a desired subject.

My advice to others is to trust your intuition. Do not seek validation from classroom critiques; your peers or professors. These forums bear little if any consequence to the totality of your career as an artist and professional. Perseverance and confidence in what you do are your two greatest allies. Never exchange your ideas about your own work, for what others assume or suggest for the sake of their cause. Your most important audience is yourself.