If you thumbed through the photography books on the shelves in my office, I suspect you’d peg me as a fellow with a very wide range of photographic tastes. I have books by photojournalists but also art photographers; I own collections of the work of photographic pioneers, but also contemporary image-makers. Even if you just picked out a few of the landscape photography books I’ve collected, you’d see the tack-sharp, zone-system-perfect work of Ansel Adams, but also the soft and dreamy landscape images that are the recent work of Sally Mann.
My own way of seeing is often all over the photographic map: I make my primary living by photographing human beings at fluid, always-moving, go-go-go wedding events. Not long ago, however, a food magazine sent me a check for an altogether different kind of work: A still-life picture of some eggs.
Photography: It’s too varied a thing to exist quietly on a bookshelf or in a pigeonhole.
The past few days have been foggy around the Puget Sound area and the personal, just-for-fun pictures that have found their way into my camera seem to look best in black-and-white (though color could have been interesting too...) I was on a ferry headed to Seattle and played with the coming-together of objects and shapes as a cormorant tried in vain to dry his wings while surrounded by fog. Another morning I was walking the dog and liked the patterns and lines of my neighbor’s teepee, the out-of-time way the shelter looked there in a foggy pasture.
I get a kick out of wondering what tomorrow might bring.
