Brian is something else. Working by day as a lawyer, his other world is about making pictures. I've always admired people who could pull this off. I worked in a system, being a photo teacher, that was extremely supportive of my photography. But Brian's vocation as a lawyer never has anything to do with his love of making pictures.

It certainly  doesn't seem to slow him down, though. Here's what he says about himself:

Brian spent three years as an assistant to a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist at The Boston Globe. Now, he uses a 4x5 camera to create images about Cape Cod, American culture, and our relationship with the natural world.

Brian is represented by Panopticon Gallery, Boston, MA. His photographs have also been exhibited at Danforth Art, the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Provincetown Art Museum, the Houston Center for Photography, Stone Crop Gallery, St. Botolph Club, Schoolhouse Gallery, the New Hampshire Institute of Art, and in the Magenta Foundation’s “Flashed” Exhibit.

In addition to the Spring 2013 show at Panopticon Gallery, I’m Not On Your Vacation will also be the subject of a solo exhibition at Danforth Art in the Fall of 2013.

His curent work is called "I'm Not on Your Vacation". Here are some pictures from that work:

What do I like about this work? I like that Brian is a real craftsperson in the way he uses the 4 x 5 inch view camera, and the quality of his prints and the way they are framed and presented. I like the frontal, relaxed but powerful character of his pictures. It is though they say that this is the way it is, deal with it. I like the project's definition. It allows him to work on the Cape off season and to fold in anything that is good into the body of work.

I know this Cape Cod, you probably do too. Off season the blush is off the rose, the area doesn't look so good and it appears a little seedy and tawdry. The on season gloss of the Cape in mid summer with its throngs of people and everything open trying to get as many tourist dollars before the season closes is contrasted with a place worn down and showing its essential character.

This work will be at Panopticon gallery in Boston for a few more days, til the 13th. If you miss it, you'll be able to see it at the Danforth Museum in Framingham this coming fall.

It's been an honor to show with Brian at the gallery.

Brian's website and contact info is here.

Bob O'Connor is an editorial/advertising photographer in the New England area and a former student of mine from Northeastern. I'd like to claim some credit for Bob's success but it really isn't justified as he was already very good when I came across him and he says that he knew he wanted to be a photographer at a very early  age. Bob is simply one of the best photographers I know.

Here's what he writes about what he does:

Bob O’Connor photographs the places where people live and work. He studied architecture and photography at Northeastern University in Boston. His work has appeared in a variety of publications including The New York Times Magazine, Fast Company, Popular Science, Discover, and Fortune magazines. O’Connor’s work has also been shown at The Photographic Resource Center; Boston, MA, The Griffin Museum of Photography; Winchester MA, and Jen Bekman Gallery; New York. He was named one of “30 Emerging Photographers to Watch” by PDN in 2006 and one of Resource Magazine’s “10 Best 10” in 2009.

Bob works to position his photography in the nexus between art and commerce. Working to make a living while still maintaining your core aesthetic can be challenging and Bob seems to negotiate this space with sensitivity and skill.

Bob may shoot something outside of what a client has asked for in a given location but it is because he likes where he is and the potential the place has for pictures that will promote and support the kind of work he wants to get paid for. He said this great thing about his book ( i.e. the portfolio he shows prospective clients that highlights his work) when I met with him at my studio a few weeks ago, "I show them the work I want to get" meaning the photographs in his "book" yes, show client-based imagery he's already done, but also include speculative photographs he's made while on jobs and elsewhere that clearly identify the kind of photography he wants to get paid for.

I will shut up in a moment and let Bob speak about his work and show his pictures but there are two points I want to make. One is that this field, this level of professional work is extremely sophisticated and refined. Bob is pitching to art directors and heads of firms that are knowledgeable and highly educated. They expect the same level of knowledge of history and understanding in the photographer they hire. The other is that the day of the commercial photographer existing outside of photo and liberal arts education at the undergraduate level and even the graduate level is for the most part long gone.

When pressed for an "artist statement" Bob comes back with,

I don't have a "proper" artist statement about my work. Remember, I'm coming at photography from the commercial side of things now, so aesthetics are frequently more important than conceptual ideas to me. That said, here's a bit of info about my thought process.

He continues:

My favorite photo related quote is from Garry Winogrand and goes “There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described. I photograph to see what something will look like photographed.” I like to think that this idea applies to my work as well. My work is really just about paying attention to the environment that's around me. I'm trying to make extraordinary photographs of ordinary places. I'm drawn to the types of commercial/industrial/institutional spaces that many people spend lots of time in, but tend to overlook as they go about their day. So much so that I'm frequently questioned why I'm photographing said thing, because there's nothing inherently interesting about them to regular people. The photographs are generally not about people, but you still get the sense of people. Someone had to create these spaces after all (I don't have much interest in photographing pure unadulterated landscapes). I like to think about these environments as sets that something may have happened / will happen in the future.

So why these type of environments? It appears that things have come full circle - After a couple failed attempts at passing the required physics class that my architectural studies required and a job at an architectural firm that did mostly boring suburban office buildings and commercial retail projects, I decided that I'd rather be photographing the things people build rather than designing them myself. Ironically, it's this boring architecture, that drove me away from that career, that is ultimately what I'm most interested in photographing. I didn't realize this was happening at the beginning, but is pretty clear to me now. I guess you're drawn to what you're drawn to.

In relation to the Iceland pictures reproduced below, Bob and I found ourselves discussing a couple of people and I said that Harry Callahan had this nice little thing he would tell us as students and that was that he believed we only made pretty much one kind of picture throughout our careers. This simply meant that we were looking to establish a core visual identity, something probably never achieved but always striven for. This isn't to imply that anyone, let alone Bob, is making simplistic pictures. Quite the contrary. Rather I think of his work as a clear distillation of content. I believe this is what Bob is speaking of in his Iceland pictures:

I realize the Iceland photos are a complete anomaly to all of what I've just said about being interested in ordinary places. It is both an extraordinary place and beautiful all on its own. The same set of rules of scale and perspective that I use for my other photographs do carry over though.

Back here to his client-based work:

Back to Iceland:

And, last time, back to assignment work:

In many peoples' minds commercial work is "gun for hire" work and then there is personal work, standing apart from the other work. I would propose that this model is perhaps no longer relevant and a newer model has emerged. Bob is a good example of the new model where it is all his work, one indistinguishable from the other.

It seems that through simplification we can find clarity, refinement and depth. Of course the danger is that with this you could arrive at... booorrriiing. Not Bob, however, as he knows that in order to hold our interest he has to make the reduction crucial, essential and relevant.

I can remember teaching a lecture class at Northeastern called  "Contemporary Directions in Photography" one year and at the end of each class I asked, "What is photography?" Bob was in that class. 

I think we all struggle with that concept, knowing what this thing called photography really is. I know I do.

But from all appearances I would say Bob O'Connor knows the answer as well as a few and better than most.

Bob can be reached through his site: Bob O'Connor

Zach Vitale's profile comes from my being one of his teachers while he was at Northeastern. I was so impressed with Zach and his work that I asked him to assist in my senior class the year after he graduated.

In my conversation with him a few weeks ago I learned of his various experiences  since he graduated working in a school lab, working for an aerial photographer, finishing digital files for various clients and presently, his work as a digital retoucher.

Zach is one of the wizards behind the photographs you see in ads and editorial spreads.

He explains it very well himself:

i was born in new york and was your stereotypical math/science nerd in high school (mathletes, physics club, awkward "too big for my face" glasses, magic cards, etc). i moved to boston for college and initially started at northeastern for mathematics, but i had a sudden realization that i wanted to do something more fun and people-based than math. after brief pit-stops in mechanical engineering and animation, i found photography and fell in love with it-- it's the perfect merger of math, art and science. after completing some really fulfilling personal work and experimenting with different types of photography, i found that i liked working collaboratively with others to achieve their vision for their work. retouching has provided me with a great opportunity to meet some incredibly talented and kind folks and work with them on a regular basis, and i love what i do every day.

The personal work Zach refers to is the Binary photographs he did as a senior thesis project at Northeastern:

which he explains this way:

the binary work is about looking at something to find the balance between fluidly communicating with others while preserving one's sense of self. communication is more than a fixed set of data, sentences on a page, or a few spoken words- it is a process. it is my hope that looking at this work feels like talking to a person- a surprising, confusing, enlightening, and challenging search for something slightly more than the small units which define our daily exchanges.

This one, above, always reminded me of a conversation I had with Fred Sommer. We were talking about the musical notation drawings he made. He made them out of a sense of visual integrity, not how they would sound, as he wasn't a musician. His theory was that if he wrote music that looked good, then it would sound good too (this is a gross simplification, with apologies to all things Fred). So, I asked him if his music had ever been played and he said, yes, it had. I then asked him how it sounded and he said that it sounded very good. This was typical Fred Sommer in that you didn't really know if it had or not.

Can you imagine what this was like? To be a senior thesis professor and have this arrive in your class one day? I'm down there in the trenches dealing with some good work but some not such good work too; pictures of boyfriends, puppy pictures, some sports photographs, and this intellectual and emotional tour de force arrives in class authored by Zach, who is the nicest person you'd ever want to meet. All of a sudden we're having a conversation on a whole different plane. I am bowled over by these. This is what you want is someone who can raise the bar and open ideas up to the class so that the group can work at a higher level, or at least aspire towards one. Zach did that.

One now famous story about Zach making these was that they were done in the photo lab and students working on finals tended to hang out in the lab and often pulled all nighters. As the Binary project was incredibly time consuming to make, Zach was in the lab many nights and coffee was the primary system for staying awake. He and his friends liked Dunkin Donuts coffee with a shot or two of espresso in it. One late night they wanted to go on a coffee run but all the DD's were closed except one across town. No one had a car and there were no cabs but there was a Zipcar pickup point nearby. They rented a Zipcar, dove to the Dunkin Donuts, got their coffee and then returned the car. Mission accomplished.

So, there is life after the senior year in college and it took Zach a while to find his voice, his profession and his purpose. Being an idealist is hard and Zach has had to come to terms with living in the world in which he lives. He needs an income, for one. But he hasn't stopped being Zach and for that I am very grateful.

He started a website called "One Tiny Hand" with two other photographers.

I'll let him explain:

I was bored at a job I used to work at, and needed a fast way to pass the time while people went out on smoke breaks. I had access to tons of images of models, and sometimes messed around with them. Eventually, I started making hands tiny. It was quick (and grew quicker as I did more), fun, and sometimes I would show them to people and they'd laugh. When that job ended, I missed making the hands tiny. I didn't have access to the images of the models anymore, so I started pulling images from the internet and messing with them whenever I needed a break from freelance work. I posted them to Facebook and almost everyone told me I needed to make a website. So with help from Bob and James, One Tiny Hand was born. Within a few hours of launch, hundreds of thousands of people had seen it.

A lot of people ask me what the website is about, or if there's some "message" or subtext. I think the biggest thing to take away from One Tiny Hand is that we all consume pictures too quickly and don't give them the time they deserve. Millions of people have looked at, "liked", "reblogged", shared, etc. images from the site without realizing that they've been altered. I think that's fascinating. Incredible things happen in the moment when you realize something isn't what you thought it was, and I hope our website's inspired some of those moments. That said, the pictures are ridiculous and weird and still, a year later, make me laugh super hard…. so I hope people are laughing at the absurdity of it too. It's a silly website on the internet and I hope it's made some folks smile.

There have been a lot of opportunities to commercialize and profit from the website. Ultimately, I think keeping things fun, simple and keeping money out of the equation is the way to go. It may seem strange to think about it this way, but the website's a labor of love for me. I like knowing that people get to work, dreading their day, and have something to look at that may make their day just a bit better. That means far more to me than anything else.

Clearly, Zach has a range of sensitivities and proclivities that are somewhat exceptional, combined with a sense of humor that is something else. How has he resolved his work life and creative life? He has become a digital retoucher. This gets him working on projects that are challenging, allows him to refine and improve his technical abilities (which have always been amazing) as new jobs come up, pay the bills and interact with top commercial, editorial, professional firms, designers and art directors.

These below are not shot by Zach but worked on by him to retouch and complete imagery for clients:

I have always loved seeing where students of mine ended up. How they worked their way through a myriad of choices and life's barriers to get to a place that gave them a living and a sense of making a contribution in our world. This didn't always work out and was fraught with obstacles but I was often surprised at how often it did.

In concluding this post I want to thank Zach for his participation in all parts of the profile. Over the years I have learned a great deal from him. I look forward to keeping up with where he goes, what he finds himself curious about, what he finds himself thinking about and looking at. I also look forward to trying to keep up.

Zach Vitale can be reached through his site: http://www.zachvitale.com. 

In this series of profiles I am doing I have set some ground rules. I have chosen to write about people that stand out as talented, eloquent and unique. People who have a directness and a clarity of purpose in their work but more importantly in their lives.

Case in point: meet Krista Casey.

Krista Casey lives in Boston and was a student of mine at Northeastern several years ago. I can't claim any particular credit for how she's turned out as she and I didn't work very closely together. But she did work closely with my colleague Andrea Raynor. Krista is remarkable in that she is very focused on revealing through her photography the significance of events and things that have happened to her over her lifetime. She also comes from a "different place" with her pictures. I'll let her explain:

I feel connected to the camera because my vision is similar to that of a lens. When I was six years old, I was diagnosed with an eye disease that left me dependent on my left eye. Everybody sees their world differently, but I always assumed they looked out at it in the same way. A way that I knew I would never be able to see. But you can’t turn away from who you are. Life is not perfect and it is how you embrace the imperfections that makes your life what it will be.
The way I see the world every day is similar to how another person would look at it through a camera. I realized this early in my life and knew intuitively that this unique vision could be my inspiration.

Imagine being able to know that when you are young? I wasn't capaple of anything like clarity of thought when I was young.

She continues:

It wasn’t until recently, when I started on the body of work entitled “I”, that I understood how I could use my vision and experiences to create unique imagery. I had struggled with other material, trying to find a new approach to things that have been photographed over and over. Then I saw that I needed to turn the camera on myself and use this body of work as a way to express to everyone else how I have been seeing/experiencing the world since I was six years old.
I see as if my eye creates a telescope that allows me to study things carefully. I believe that vision is used not just to look around, but to actually see what is happening in the world.

Krista has made a fundamental discovery here, and there is a lesson in it for all of us. We are only where and what we come from and our individuality is what we have to offer as an artist or creative person. So many go down paths to look like someone else, to make their work mimic others for they don't believe they have enough on their own to be accepted. There is a vision of humanity's future that believes that we are all artists and that there won't be an elite class, that art will flow out of all of us, recognizing a universal creativity and the uniqueness of the individual. Perhaps a little utopian but possible. One would like to think that huminity can evolve. If it survives.

Krista blends the worlds of fashion, design and photography seamlessly. This reflects her varied interests and acknowledges that she assumes no barriers to creativity are going to slow her down. I find it fascinating that the images shown here are all made in camera, no Photoshop masks. Not always pretty, they evoke dreams or maybe nightmares.

She writes in her bio:

I have shown different bodies of work at various galleries throughout New England. The two latest shows that I participated in, I also helped to curate. One, at the Griffin Museum of Photography, was a group show that included members from the Northeastern graduating class of 2009. The show was put together by the participants. Seven unique bodies of work came together to create a dynamic show; I most enjoyed finding ways to make the different photography work together in an interesting way. I was named photographer of the year for my senior class, which included a $1,000 award that I used when I went to Europe following graduation.
I want to continue to find ways to weave together my photography and design work. The combination of the two helps me to find new inspiration from two different worlds. I have a deep base to pull from and my curiosity in the world of design helps to fuel my photography.

I see this work by Krista as an extension of who she is. The clarity in her words about her work comes though in her pictures.  That is so powerful to me.

I'll let her sum it up:

My sight is not good, but I see incredibly well. People and emotions have great power for me. Just because your vision is good doesn’t mean that you can really see. Some people go through life entirely consumed in themselves and their world. They look around them, but see nothing. Some people have excellent sight, but only look inward or backward.
Now I am preoccupied with looking versus seeing. People go through their whole lives without really seeing themselves. Photographers shed light on things that an everyday person wouldn’t otherwise see. I would like to show people things that they refuse to see.
My life experience seeps into my work. Things that I encounter and experience every day play over and over in my mind and then are released through my camera in what seems a mysterious way. I see “I” as a lifelong project. I think that it will grow and express itself in new and interesting ways as I age and experience my own life in my unique way. I look forward to where this project will take me and I hope to continue to be able to share it with others.

I have a confession to make and it is one not so easy to write as it dates me and perhaps my generation too. It is that when I was beginning to be aware of photographs as art in my twenties the photographs that I was looking at and trying to learn from were most often simpler and not tied to a story or a context. They were pictures that were to be viewed and understood as simply pictures. Now the context, the story, the viewpoint are all important. Krista's relationship with her vision, her view of the world, is the story here and hugely important. It is as though the  monumental images and statements have been made by the likes of Adams, Weston, Evans, Atget, Callahan, Sommer, Siskind, etc. and in this later and more mature phase of a now older and more ubiquitous form of photography we have artists making smaller, more personal additions to the overall discipline. I don't know if that is clear or not. Hope so.

Want to contact Krista? Need to know more about her work?

Go here: Krista Casey

I have only highlighted a small part of what Krista does. I urge you to go to her site for find out more.

Thank you, Krista, for sharing your work and thoughts.

Liz Ellenwood is a photographer/artist who's been out of school for just a few years. I first met Liz when when she was interning at Panopticon Gallery in 2011. I was delivering my work to be hung in a show and she was tasked with unpacking it and setting it up to hang. We've been friends ever since.

Here's her bio:

Elizabeth Ellenwood is a recent graduate of the New Hampshire Institute of Art where she received a Bachelors of Fine Art in Photography. Upon graduation, Elizabeth moved to Boston, MA to pursue her interest in fine art photography. She currently works as an assistant to architectural photographer Peter Vanderwarker and as a darkroom assistant at Panopticon Imaging. Her photographs have recently been exhibited at Panopticon Gallery in Boston and at the Plymouth Center for the Arts where she won the Lexjet Award for Best Print and Presentation. Her work will be included at an upcoming group exhibition at SOHO Photo Gallery in New York City in March 2013. Elizabeth’s photography is a part of the New Hampshire Institute of Art’s Permanent Collection as well as private collections throughout New England.

Liz has had the requisite jobs that weren't photo related since leaving New Hampshire,  among those serving hamburgers (she is vegetarian), hostessing and working in a café.  Now, at the ripe old age of 25 she assists for Peter Vanderwarker, one of the top architectural photographers nationally, and also works for Panopticon Imaging as a gelatin silver black and white printer. Not bad for being so new to the game.

She also is a wonderful artist. Her primary interest is in large format black and white with a foundation of photographing architecture. This week Liz and I spent few hours together going over some new work she is very excited about. We also looked at where it was coming from and where it was going.

This is what she has to say about the work:

It is my grandfather’s abstract paintings that inspire my present approach to photographing architecture. His simplification of objects into geometric shapes and the purposeful disorientation of the viewer spark an important question for me: who says architecture has to be documented with a clearly defined foreground, background, top or bottom? What I have created is my reaction to this question.
I have made in-camera multiple exposures of any structural forms that I find interesting without concern for straight lines, readable outlines, or the intended purpose of the structure. An entirely new composition is created when rows of financial buildings become overlapping textures of light and dark merging with other abstractions. Each layered image creates a confusion of depth, space, and time which offers visual possibilities and interpretations for the viewer.

 I asked her what got her started making these multi-planal and complex pictures of man-made forms. 

She said she wanted to take her photography to its next level, meaning to impose a level of personal interpretation and exploration to the content of her pictures. Notice I didn't use the word "control", that's because she very specifically wants to allow her pictures in this project to be less about knowing and more about finding out. Working with 120mm roll film, she shoots strips, building up exposure that overlaps previous frames. In printing she simply chooses what strips to print, so that sometimes the pictures take on a characteristically panoramic look and at other times they are rendered in a conventional rectangle. The pictures are inventive and nicely informal.  Liz speaks about how she can't really see what the pictures are like until later, when she processes the film. Although her process is analog, she does use the scan of the strip to look at it on a monitor to find where she wants to start and stop the frame.

So much of contemporary photography that we see online is about making pictures as some sort of literal interpretation of what's in front of the camera. Not this project by Ellenwood. In the progression from student to "just out of school" former student to adult and active, viable and contributing artist, Liz Ellenwood has made excellent progress in a very short time. The pictures seem, to this writer, like assertions of creative intent as opposed to documentation or interest in just architectural form and structure.

Although Liz isn't one to weigh the pictures down with unnecessary analysis she is clear on one point: they are as much a discovery for her as they are for us. I find this admirable in that it is part of the process of growth to make pictures to learn about pictures. She also has the added advantage of being schooled well in art and photography, knows the concept of and the players in Cubism and can reference the more modern force of  paintings like those of Richard Estes, a super realist with a decidedly Cubist proclivity. 

As we were starting to wrap up the interview I asked Liz where this was going. Did she have an outcome in mind? Besides working to get them shown and/or seen, no. It seemed okay to just make them, to look at them, to share them with others that might give insight and feedback and to learn to let them lead her to the next place. Intuition plays a large part here and it is very good to be able to trust your instincts and let something roll. Liz projects confidence, humility and curiosity, in about equal measure. 

On of the very rewarding things about my profession of teaching and in all the years I practiced it was to help a student understand that it was for them to find out what to do or say and then give them the space to go and do just that.  Liz is on that path now, finding a way to speak with her own voice. It is very exciting to watch it from the sidelines.