Photography and the Creative Process

In 1978 I started playing around with the old cameras I had found in a cabinet in my dorm room in college. A friend and I captured this image while walking around Fairfield, Iowa, with my old plastic Ansco Anscoflex twin lens reflex camera, the one with the large dish flash attachment that took real [...]

There is a photograph of Jack Nicholson on the cover of the March/April 2008 AARP magazine. I am struck by the photographer’s use of depth of field. In the photo, the main part of Nicholson’s face is in focus while his left ear, the top of his head, and his shoulders are out of focus. [...]

At an impromptu jam session, someone handed me a sketchpad and invited me to draw.  I replied, “I sketch with my camera.”
The resulting image, Pete Plays the Blues, will be exhibited at the Laurel Art Guild’s 39th Annual Open Juried Exhibition at the Montpelier Arts Center in Laurel, Maryland, March 9 through March 30, 2008.
This [...]

At the Maryland Renaissance Festival, the performers and other players are not allowed to employ the modern accouterments to which we are accustomed. They cannot wear eyeglasses, eat with plastic spoons, or wear clothing that is not true to the period. This is to ensure that these actors contribute the the authentic feel [...]

Daniel Oppenheimer, in writing about the photographer, Diane Arbus, states that her “brilliance was to catch everybody unmasked, at the moment of transition between unconscious repose and practiced, social self-representation. People seemed to reveal, in that moment, their essential being . . .”
My objective in making photographic portraits is to do the same thing, although [...]