About my photography

I don't happen to think that most photographers who talk about their artistic intentions really know what they're talking about. That is, most discussions of intentions in photography are really post hoc, or post facto. "How will I know what I intended until I see what I printed?" might be an appropriate followon to the writer's dictum, "How will I know what I meant until I read what I said?" Diane Arbus's observation may be the wisest: "My photographs are always better, or worse, than I intended." While I'm not at all sure that nuns fret not their convent's narrow rooms, I think Wordsworth was pointing to the right connection between intention and result in art: we choose the preconditions, often by deciding what we will include or exclude, what we will use as means or decline to use; the oeuvre is then shaped by the resulting narrow(ed) rooms of our practice.

My rooms? Looking at what I in fact do as a photographer, and, pretty much, what I have done for about fifty years, here are some things I see. Bear in mind that what I see as a critic of my own work has no more validity than any other critical statement.

I photograph on the move. Although I own some large format cameras, the only ones I use are those that can be hauled about and used as an extension of my person (Graflexes and Speed Graphics, for example). Portability and ease of use is my main criterion, so my arsenal includes DSLRs, 35mm SLRs and rangefinders, and readily-portable medium format equipment--a Pentax 6x7, Kodak Medalist, and a 6x6 Rollei. I own tripods, but usually don't use them. Pretty much, I carry cameras as I walk, and the movement of myself through the world is what yields my images.
I do think it is a valid principle that there are no untouched landscapes in the world--all have been shaped by human contact, and it is only in terms of human contact, or human assignment of meaning, that the natural world "tells" for us. As Coleridge observed, "In our lives alone does nature live/Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud." Perception alone alters even the wildest landscape; "esse est percipi."
But I don't further touch the landscape I find in front of my lens. I select, move about, decide on what to over and underexpose, and so forth. But I don't fiddle with the stuff I find in the world.
Likewise, I tend toward minimal manipulation of my images, even though today we can readily do all kinds of things in the digital domain. 99.9% of my PhotoShop installation remains untouched.
One abstraction I commonly allow myself is that of isolating highlights through exposure and thus turning them into midtones. This is an, I think, important concession to the narrow room of the camera: neither film nor photosites can take in the vast range of light that we constantly analyze in bits and pieces in our everyday human vision. A photograph isn't "what the eye sees," but, rather, "what the eye interprets of what the camera sees." I'm more comfortable being obvious about it.

In the words of a computer-generated poem from the '60s: "The roses are vomiting/Enough!"