Category: General
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Exploring our responsibility to the people we photograph (part two)
In the last (and the next) few blog posts, I am exploring the question, what is the photographer’s responsibility to the people they are photographing? On one level this is an intensely personal decision that is best answered after an equally intensely process of decision-making. On the other hand, it has to be guided by some larger philosophical framework. If that sounds like an…
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Exploring our responsibility to the people we photograph (part one)
A photographer/friend wrote me with an excellent question, one that I now realize that I have been struggling with over my entire career as a photographer/photojournalist. In order to answer him coherently I needed to do what I have been doing in so many recent blog entries. That is, taking the question, rolling it around in my head, mining my life’s experience, making some…
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Staring at life, staring at death (part two)
In the first part of this two-part blog entry, I shared my daughter’s perspective on our shared experience photographing kids with cancer and other life-threatening illnesses through an organization called, “Flashes of Hope.” Although I was in the exact same place as she was, working on the same project, I took away a different set of experiences from that very emotionally compelling day. Out…
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Staring at life, staring at death (part one)
As an art photographer I like to think of my photographs as creative interpretations of an idea or experience I have had. As a photojournalist, I hope that my images work as narratives of an event or issue that I think others should know about. I have recently been considering some other particularly compelling ways to think about the photographs that we photographers make.
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A Lesson About Lessons in Photography
Golf, as a sport and the popular obsession with it have long mystified me. Even in the wake of the recent crash and burn of Tiger Woods, I normally would not follow it much. However, a friend who is as much a golfer as he is a photographer has pressed me to write something about golf and photography and I did so back in…
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Black and white vs Color (part three)
This is the final of three blog posts exploring the question of using color vs black and white in photography. To date, I have shared work that was intentionally made in color and later converted to black and white for comparison purposes. I also shared work that was made in color, but was intended to be experienced in black and white. After sharing those…
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Black and white vs Color (part two)
In my last blog entry, I started exploring the question of black and white vs. color photographs. Specifically, I was talking about how a photographer should think clearly about the intentional choice of using one or the other for a given project. To get started, I suggested that readers look at a set of my photographs, exploring the foreclosure crisis, in both color and…
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Black and white vs Color (part one)
One thing that I love about blogging (and teaching,) is how both have helped me take a half-baked idea and clarify it. Like most people, my head is a jumble of ideas that come and go. Certain ideas appear more often than others, and the most persistent ones eventually take on a life of their own. When they do that, they move from my…
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Pictures, purges and process (part two)
As of late, I have been writing about the massive spring-cleaning I have undertaken over the last few weeks. I am pretty much done with this archival edit and purge. I have also been thinking how much fun it was looking through thirty plus year’s worth of work. In all, it was a good starting point to reconsider the evolution of my style as…