Artist Statement:

I have lived in Oberlin since 1974, but only began taking photographs in 2010, when my wife Mary gave me a small digital camera that I could carry with me on my daily walks around town.  At first, I confined myself to flowers, either in our gardens or around town.  I wanted to find beauty in my everyday life, and I thought of flower blossoms as ready-made packets of beauty that I could simply record and preserve with my new toy.  I decided to post one photo from my walks every day on Facebook, to share my interests with friends and add some discipline to the project.  I knew nothing about taking photos and studiously avoided courses and guidebooks—I’d been in school for sixty years, as a student and then a teacher, and wanted to pursue my interest on my own, learning by taking photos.  The result, as of now, is an archive of about 20,000 images in Apple’s Cloud.

After a year or so, I began to feel more confident about experimenting with different subjects I found on my walks, the buildings on the College campus, the light at different times of the day and year, images reflected in windows and especially in water.  I became fascinated with the pond in front of the Conservatory of Music, where I spent hours figuring out how to capture the trees, rocks, and fish reflected at different times of the day.  I started to try to create beauty rather than simply recording it.

In 2016, I retired from teaching at Oberlin College.  I decided that I wanted to use a more advanced camera and asked a friend who was a professional photographer for advice on how what camera would work for what I wanted to do.  He sent me a few choices, and I picked a Fujifilm X30, which has various filters built in.  The ability to manipulate images to create more dramatic contrasts and intensity of color suited my evolving preferences, and I have used the X30 ever since. 

In 2017, Mary and I moved to 218 Kendal Drive, behind Rock Pond.  I suddenly had a whole new landscape to work with, in particular the pond and the water birds that came through.  Because I wanted to take close-up photos of the birds on our pond and also at the many wonderful parks in the area, I bought a second camera, a Canon “PowerShot” SX70 HS, which has a powerful zoom lens.  The photos of birds in the show were taken with this camera.

For a show in our Community Gallery in 2020, I began to have photos printed on aluminum, which I think enhances the depth and vividness in the images.  In the last year or two, I have also experimented with having some photos printed on canvas.  Not every photo looks interesting in this latter form, and I am still learning how to use it.  There are five images on canvas in this show, and you can decide for yourself how far I have to go.

I still haven’t learned much about the technical side of photography in the last fifteen years, but I have gotten to know more about what kinds of images I consider interesting and hopefully beautiful.  I am grateful to my friends Mary Behm and Grover Zinn for inviting me to show my work.