About
Gee — i hate webpages that say “this site under construction”, so i won’t do that.
I plan to use this site mostly for photography display, and maybe some comments on what, why, and how I produce this work.
The easiest and most trivial thing to start with is the equipment.
A few mechanical Nikons and a Leica M3 are used for 35mm work, using Kodachrome 25, Fuji Velvia and Provia, and Ilford Delta 100.
For medium format work, I have used a
Minolta Autocord,
Rollei SL66,
Fuji 670 III, and
Mamiya 7 II,
and an Orbit 6×7 back on a Toyo 45 Field camera.
I have used Fujia Velvia, Provia 100, Kodak Ektachrome G and GX, as well as Ilford Delta 100 and 400.
Large format work is done on the Toyo with Schneider 120 SA and 210 Symmar-S lenses, Kodak Super XX and Kodak Tri-X film. Super XX is an old style thick emulsion B&W film which St. Ansel recommended for its strong response to manipulation in development. It was pretty grainy but it did allow extreme intensification of higher value contrasts (the brighter stuff) like the fog in the image “Tarn” in the B&W album.
B&W film is exposed using the Zone System for control of contrast. I use both a spot meter and an incident meter, as needed. I first used HC-110 developer, again following Adams’ recommendations, and have subsequently found other soups I like much better, after trying D-76, Rodinal, FG-7, ID-11, and Ilford Ilfosol S.
Stereo work is done with the Nikons, a Kodak Stereo, and a Realist Stereo (f/3.5 Ilex lenses, for the stereo geeks). Film is Fuji Provia 100 or Veliva 50. I have a bunch of B&W Agfa Scala stereo slides I may scan and post one of these days. I wish Agfa hadn’t discontinued it.
I used to make B&W gelatin silver prints using Zone System as well, but have been printing digitally for the last 5 years or so. The projection printing equipment is all in boxes in the basement. I might start doing wet prints again if i ever have the space to set up a printing darkroom, but digital printing is getting very good, and B&W paper is becoming extinct, so perhaps my enlarger and associated equipment are about to become industrial sculpture.
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I’m not sure yet how explicit I want to get about aesthetics and philosophy. If the images move you, they work, if not, who cares why I made them or how I did it…..If the impulses and motivations for my work were verbal concepts, I’d be a writer, not a photographer.
I have some specific interests and goals compositionally. I pay attention to the fact that different parts and systems in the brain process color versus black and white imagery, and they look for different features in an image.
I was raised on Abstract Expressionism, which is visually Mom’s Home Cooking to me. As a little kid I was also very taken with the medieval Flemish miniatures, as well as Breugel, and Bosch that i saw frequently when my folks took me to the Philadelphia Art Museum.
Later on I enjoyed Picasso, Bracque, Klee, Kandinsky, Matta, Miro, Max Ernst, Frankenthaler, Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Diebenkorn, Rauschenberg, Motherwell, and Robert Irwin.
Starting very early in life I was drawn to Japanese visual aesthetics, Kufic Islamic calligraphy, as well as the visual rhythms of Indian, Thai, Cambodian, and Burmese sculpture and architectural detailing.
I also love the visual rhythms of Phillippine, Thai, and Japanese basketry. I spent a lot of time as a child wandering through the anthropological collections of the University Museum, which included Egyptian, Mayan, South Pacific, Oceanic, Native American, Chinese, Japanese, and Near Eastern material that impressed me.
I think those influences reached me earlier and more deeply than photographic ones, but I have also enjoyed work by Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, Edward and Brett Weston, Minor White, Paul Caponigro, John Sexton, Bruce Barnbaum, Monte Nagler, Max Yavno, Jerry Uelsmann, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, and many other (mostly black and white) photographers.
I can’t think of a lot of color photography that has influenced me, except people like Leonart Nilsson and Steven Dalton, whose work is not really about color specifically.