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For more than forty years my photography has been a
means of engaging with, more fully experiencing, and better understanding
the layering of meaning that resides below the surface of life. My work
reflects a number of influences, ranging from early training and mentoring
by the author and photographer John Howard Griffin to the inspiration of
such photographers as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Weston, Marie Cosindas,
and many, many others. As would be predicted by such a diverse list, my
photographs are quite varied in subject matter: images of people in
India and elsewhere,
graffiti-laden walls, and studies of a single forested acre in North
Carolina.
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Photo by Diane Mines |
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In photographing my world I both observe and participate in
it, creating images that reveal a common artistic impulse: to participate in
life by looking, to allow oneself to be touched and influenced by what one
sees, to articulate that experience, and, hopefully, to illuminate it. My
photographs reflect not only “what’s out there,” but also who I am, how I
see, and what I make of what I see. The physical record of those moments of
living allows me to share them and, perhaps more fundamentally, to
re-experience them.
The opportunity to “take a second look” at my experiences is
among the more sublime pleasures of photography, because in that process I
often see more deeply than I find possible in the blur of time. It is this
process, rather than the specific content of any given image, that moves me
to lift the camera to my eye. I shoot what I resonate to, and that is why
my images are so varied, ranging from portrait to landscape, from figurative
to abstract.
In my prior career as a psychotherapist, I often perceived
strengths in my clients where they believed they had none. This incongruity
was a catalyst for their re-examination of what they had thought to be
“truths” about themselves. As a photographer, too, I tend to see beauty –
and irony and humor and pain and dignity – in aspects of life that might
otherwise pass as mundane. Often my subjects differ greatly from myself in
culture and convention. Yet it is the human relationship shared between us
that is recorded on film. I hope that each image embraces that moment of
connection and, in the revealed pentimento, sheds light on its depth.
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