A bit of personal history
I've been 'taking pictures' ever since my father got me interested when I was about 12 in California in the 60's. It began with a Ricoh Diacord TLR and a darkroom built in a corner of the garage. Over the years I moved on to 35mm SLRs combined with various medium and large format cameras, my enlarger growing to keep up with the latter. My Toyo field 4x5 and Besseler are still with me, waiting to go back into service one day when I have enough space to install a darkroom (maybe). Up until the 90’s I was only interested in B&W, with a particular penchant for landscapes and nature, guided technically by Ansel Adams’ zone system. Anyone who has worked with a large format in the field knows how ‘contemplative’ this type of photography is - so much time spent looking for a combination of subject, light and composition that merits the effort that will be necessary to produce a (potentially) valid print. Many times I went out for a day to return with only several exposed films, sometimes none. But such photography forces one to really look and think about each image, projecting it all the way through to the characteristics of the final print: composition, depth of field, perspective, greyscale...
But most subjects are too dynamic, too transient for large format photography, among them one of my other main interests – people and life, and for such subjects an SLR loaded with TriX was much more appropriate. The legacy of this period is several thousand negatives, all formats combined.
Another important aspect of this ‘non digital’ period is the fact that a photograph only really ‘exists’ when it had been brought all the way into the form of an image on paper. The negative was only a promise of what might become, of that which could be shared with others - the highest quality B&W print that I could produce. But that’s an aspect which would take me too far from the present, and this website.
Various factors, the most important being my move to France in the mid-80s and family/work circumstances, led to a roughly 15 year period very poor in photography. This was due principally to the fact that I no longer had a darkroom, therefore the impossibility of personally bringing any image all the way to the print form. This dry spell came to an end roughly 15 years ago when various factors, other than that I missed photography, induced me to ‘go digital’, one of the most important being the promise of being able to produce high quality B&W images using the Piezography® inkjet system. Going digital also enticed me into including colour in my photographic vision, again because inkjet technology had reached a level permitting production of images of excellent fidelity and quality.
But while I need to have a print-on-the-wall in order to consider the image making process complete, simple logistics means that they pile up in boxes in a cupboard. One of my objectives, now that I have much more time for photography, is to see if I can share my images-vision with others, ideally through exhibitions in one form or another. This website is a small, first step in this direction.