“Here’s the dilemma and the strength of photography. It’s the easiest medium in which to be competent. But, it’s the hardest medium in which to have personal vision that is readily identifiable.”

-chuck close

I think this is very true. I learned how to use a camera in about 15 minutes at age 12 to take photos of a basketball game for the yearbook. A 2 month stint as an assistant showed me how to light with strobes at 23. Years later, I´m still struggling to find my readily identifiable personal vision. I´m taking a master´s level documentary photography course from Fosi Vegue via blank paper. Just having time to talk and work through a personal project, look at other people´s work and also look at some of the greats will hopefully help. It´s been a long time since I was last in school.

Fosi challenged me last week to rethink letting go of my black and white vision. I´m really good at seeing effective light for black and white images. I guess I feel this pressure to shoot color because it´s what what people are looking for these days. But then there´s people like Trent Parke, who´s done some of the most interesting black and white documentary work I´ve seen in a long time. He´s trying out color and it doesn´t really work for me. Color is hard, and many times unnecessary.

My main hangup with using black and white is that I used to shoot black and white because it was free in school via the newspaper, and had to send out via mail my rolls of color and lacked a decent scanner. Once I got my hands on a digital camera that all changed.



So these portraits are my adventure back into black and white. The point of the work is to shoot musicians, producers, djs, etc not doing music but being human beings. Shooting your subjects nude can help you get to the essence of them. Sometimes just taking their guitar, turntables, or Macpro away can be just as disarming helping to get to the person behind the music. We´ll see how this works out.