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I grew up surrounded by my grandfathers collection
of original paintings, my favourites being the 20 or so by D'oyly John .. my grandfather had been a cinematographer and animator but also a
rather bad amatuer photographer.. but his taste in paintings was
exceptional. I liked Cecil's stylization and how he captured so much
with seemingly so little effort.
Bob Carlos Clarke's photography book The Dark Summer - his meticulous attention to detail impressed me, the amount of work he put into each image .. Each constructed and crafted with a great skill and understanding of technique and materials. David
Vestal's book The Art of Black and White Enlarging refined my knowledge and
revealed a heck of a lot about not just printing but making the pictures you
want to make and having a confidence to stand by your choices.
Clerc's Photography
Theory and Practice is the book i'd save if the house burned
others include
R. L. Deits who I met
by happy accident after admiring his work in the TV show babylon 5, I sold him a
camera and we struck up a conversation and echanged quite a few prints many full
sized hang around the house here.
I had an exhibition at one point and was asked if
I'd worked with a bloke called Eddie
Ephraums.. I hadn't heard of him but was surprised to find his and the
prints in that exhibition were a lot alike. I wondered if the experiences
we'd had brought about the coincidence in style.
Edward Weston - what's not to like.
All the above put in great effort to learn the art,
the skill, the technical details and nuances of the apparatus used to make
photographs and once they'd achieved this unleashed their creativity unhindered
by anything but their own vision and limits. All suceeded in making grand
images without compromise or fault as they seemed to understand their images
were simply that - pictures and not art, as the art was the skill that lay
within the artist - the result were just things that people looked at.
One thing that stuck with me was Bob Carlos
Clarke's comments in The Dark Summer - ".. after
2 1/2 years work it was hard to believe that the total time represented by
the portraits printed here was no more than 1 second". Quite
remarkable to think all that work was distilled down from a tiny fraction of
moments in time.
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