Thoughts and Technical Notes

EVERY PHOTOGRAPHER has Others - alternate views - second choices - unprinted, unshown and set aside as you moved on.   

For more than decades, I've been making photographs then selecting what to print, publish or exhibit for solo exhibits in museums and galleries and for group exhibits, in places as far-flung as Scotland and the former Soviet Union (glasnost). 

These portfolios are a collection of my Others - unprinted, unpublished, unexhibited ted images - as well as some alternate approaches  - and a few revisited pieces. 

Recently I came across advice to artists from Leonardo da Vinci , about everyday sources of inspiration for creating art. Unknowingly,  the advice speaks to my approach for making photographs, and by extension, what famous photographer, Edward Weston,  called "seeing photographically," that is, seeing the photograph before it's taken, your mind's eye  caught by beauty and uniqueness -  elemental or universal  connections  between things we encounter everyday :

Cast your glance on any walls dirty with such stains or walls made up of rock formations of different types, if you have to invent some scenes, you will be able to discover them there in diverse forms, in diverse landscapes, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, extensive plains, valleys, and hills. All bodies together, and each by itself, give off to the surrounding air an infinite number of images…each conveying the nature, color and form of the body which produces it.                                                                                                                                                                                                            
                                                                                                                                                                                        Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Ashburnham 1, c 1488   

Much of the work is in the classical, "straight" style  of photography, celebrating the elements of line, form, texture and color - isolating details in the symmetries and asymmetries of things we look at but don't always see.*  

Most of these images originated on film. The film was scanned, then processed using "digital darkroom" tools, adjusting brightness and contrast, sharpening detail and correcting and enhancing color .Some of the monochrome images are lightly toned to approximate the warmth of Agfa Portriga silver gelatin photographic paper.

Most are uncropped - pictures as seen through the lens. Others, specifically the alternative portfolio, are photocomposites - digital constructs of multiple images - reimagining, for example, a city skyline. The galleries include recently created panels of two or three related images, a type of photographic triptych. .Finally, as a virtual exhibit, each image is bordered with a graphical matte, bevel and frame.

* Thanking Henry David Thoreau, "The question is not what you look at, but what you see."  Journal Volume 7, August 1851