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I am not in any way a highly competent technical photographer. My photographs are often a bit soft, sometimes a bit noisy, and, I fear, a little too dark for some people’s taste. The compositions are often peculiar, sometimes with multiple subjects awkwardly placed rather than one subject situated according to the traditional rules of composition. One of my compositional masterpieces has a trash receptacle smack dab in the middle of the photograph with the main subject all the way to the right edge of the scene, and the secondary subject all the way to the left (where I can only hope the viewer’s eye eventually ends up). Other photographs of mine have similar compositional challenges.
But I like them.
As much as I admire the technical photographers who create stunning or amazing images, I see my own photographic pursuit as creating photographs that are not to thrill or astonish, but to engender a certain musing. I’m not looking for a “Wow!”; rather, I am hoping for a “Hmmm.”
I am fortunate to be able to go to Paris every year. Having been there many times I have seen the majority of things that people go to Paris to see. Still, there’s always something else, or something new, and there are always things I want to see again. There is a Murillo in the Louvre that I visit annually. But most of my time in Paris is just spent walking slowly through the streets, searching out interesting things to photograph. I am never disappointed.
This all started a few years ago when I began having more time to travel. At the same time I was becoming more interested in photography. It seemed like an auspicious concurrence. I naturally thought I would sharpen my skills as a travel photographer. But that is not what happened. While I took the same pictures of the same things as all the other travelers, when it came time to select images to work on, I found that the photographs that interested me were more and more the ones I took of the people in the streets, going about their normal or not-so-normal pursuits. Quite by accident, I found that I was a “street photographer,” with a certain predilection for black-and-white photographs, often taken after sunset.
In the Aperture Masters of Photography book on Walker Evans, David Company wrote, “Street photography is both a formal game and a test for anyone keen to discover what they really think about the world around them. Of all the genres, it is the one that reveals the most about the photographer. It is reactive, the camera equivalent to the psychoanalyst’s couch.”
There may be some truth in this. While I take other kinds of photographs, when I do so I know that I am just fooling around - having fun. It is when I am in an urban environment, surrounded by humans and what they have created, that I feel a certain purpose in my photography. In my own small way, I attempt to use my camera to demonstrate what it is to be human, trying to capture both the delight and the poignancy implicit in the transitory nature of my existence and that of those around me. Obtained by wandering through the streets with my camera and selected from among those subjects that caught my eye, a catalog of impressions emerges which, as a collection, I cannot help but think reveals much of who I am.
The following are photographs of Paris - my favorite place in the world to be - and the beautiful people who live there. The photographs are presented in the order they were taken, dating back to 2010. I think (and hope) there may be an evolution in these photographs from Paris experienced as a city to Paris embraced as a muse.