My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic that I got for either Christmas or my birthday when I was 13 years old. I loved taking photos and found the anticipation of getting my photos back sweeter than the reality of the headless, armless or otherwise blurred images that I regularly captured. I used my wages from working the State Theater Candy Shop to purchase rolls of film and to get the photos developed. The skinny negatives eventually resembled straw sticking out every which way in my envelope. Most of those photos have been lost, although a few images are still exist. I'm not sure what happened to my
Instamatic, I seem to remember the door being detached from the body and corroded batteries from lack of use. I went through the college years without a camera. My brother became interested in photography so I became disinterested--it was his thing. When I started wondering the world on April 1, 1989, I needed a camera to capture the memories of all the wondrous things I was experiencing. Japan was my first destination and being in a country of camera bugs helped cement the camera strap to my arm. In Japan the custom is give people in photographs that you took a copy. My negative sleeves remain marked up. Today, I have a box filled with thousands of negative that I would eventually like to transfer in a digital. Some day.
About 5 years ago, I noticed a shift in the way I captured photos, I began to enjoy the unexpected in deconstructing an object. Most of my photos are taken with a 55 to 200 mm lens. This does cause some confusion if someone tries to take a photo with my camera. But for me, the macro opens up my imagination. I am also particularly fond of capturing art work from museums. I have an idea of what I would like to do with some of these prints but I think fear of having reality not match the concept is holding me back--that and being constantly distracted by everyday life.
This picture, I ask myself What do I see? Do others see what I see? Is this photo as compelling to others as it is to me? I of course see the flower in the context that I took it. One drizzly April morning at the Huntington. I can recall the walk around the garden, the joy of discovering how lush the garden was on this particular day. My umbrella falling to the side as I try to aim the camera.
This rose caught my attention and as I framed it, I was pulled into the detail that I would have overlooked without a camera in my hand. The delicate folds of the petals with rain drops beading--domes slipping and elongating as gravity joins in. From a the palest pink barely distinguished from white gradually saturating on the edges hinting at a pink reminiscent of Pepto Bismal. Surprisingly a touch of yellow pulls the eye upward. and a small speck of dirt? aphid? moves the eye to the left and up to the edge that hints to something beyond this flower before the eye is drawn back to the right with the pale petal pushing upward. And then drifting back down to the darker, richer folds found in the bottom left. A moment captured, a part of a whole. This is what I see. This is what continues to engage me and capture my imagination.