My pursuit of photography began about seven years prior to purchasing my first camera. While in high school I became enamored with the photographic image. I tore them out of old and new magazines and bought photo postcards and greeting cards from bookstores and magazine stands to adorn every inch of my bedroom walls. I literally surrounded myself with photographs.
Most of these images were from the era of black and white photography. A lot of them were of jazz musicians, Black historical figures, ethnographic images of various cultures and societies in the African
Diaspora, artistic portraits and still lifes. The mystique of black and white captured me and seems to create in each image something greater than the representation of its subject.
I always loved listening to good stories, especially those told by older people in my life, things I read in books, and events I learned about in documentaries and history texts. As a child these stories from times prior to my birth seemed like they took place in a world beyond my reach. Old black and white photos seemed to be relics of those untouchable realms in time and space. In a way they were magical, almost talismans bringing life and power to the stories that filled my imagination.
I probably started collecting photos in 1985/86. I studied these images incessantly, meditating on every aspect of them. Over time I began to pay attention to the ways light, shadow, composition, and form shaped my experience of the subject.
Then I began to think about how the photos might have been made, thinking about lighting and composition as technical applications to be dissected and understood. Then I began to role play taking similar photos myself. Eventually I gained a technical understanding of how the photos were made. Suddenly the power that photography held in my imagination transformed into something that I felt like I could wield.
This was an amazing transition. I spent the next few years dreaming of taking my own photos until I purchased my first camera, a used Canon AE1 in 1993.
By this time I had done two years of community college and was in my first year at Clark Atlanta University (CA{U). I was a mass communications major with a focus on journalism and film. My deep connection to storytelling was clear, and although I had yet to start my practice, photography had become a deeply emotional aspect of my identity. Whatever path I took in life, it was clear that it would, in some way, be filtered through the lens of a still camera.
These galleries are a visual summary of my first 8 years pursuing photography. Once I bought my camera I threw myself headlong into photography.
While at CAU I lived in my own apartment, kept a half to three quarter time job, took as many courses as I could manage at a time, and spent all of my extra resources pursuing photography. I took a darkroom class at a community center where I learned to process my own film and make prints. From there I turned my bathroom into a part-time film processing lab. When I ran out of film. I spent hours processing what I shot and when I ran out of film to process and money to buy more film I spent hours sitting in my apartment window looking at my negatives in the sunlight. I would do my standard
checklist of what I liked about a particular negative and would imagine in my mind’s eye what it would look like printed. I had absolutely no formal photographic training, just the mental exercise of studying photographs on my own. Yet each image reflects an articulate view of the world cultivated over the previous seven years.
Those were lean financial years. I focused on having film to shoot first, then chemicals of process second. I rarely had money to make prints. As I amassed my own archive of negatives I spent as much time studying my own images as I did the images of others in years past. This time however I asked slightly different questions. What was I thinking when I pushed the shutter button to make that negative? What was my motivation? What was I seeing? What was I feeling? How were all of those things different from one time to another? From a good image to a bad one?
I began to understand who I was as a photographer. I began to understand the emotional, psychic and spiritual experience that photography was for me. I began to learn as much from my unsuccessful images as my successful ones. I began to recognize that more than creating a pretty picture, I was searching for a kind of emotional and spiritual substance. I realized I could be lifted up by the very thing that I created. I was driven by the possibility creating something that would fill me with a sense of magic and imagination. I sought after that in my everyday life, with my camera.
Each successful image was an active meditation, a way of opening up and connecting my interior world to the world around me. I came to understand photography as an process of recognition and reverence of things in me and greater than me. It felt ecstatic, like a dervish whirl, a simple, yet mystical engagement of life.
The photos in these galleries vary widely in genre; portraiture, street photography, documentary photos, wedding photos, urban and natural landscapes, still lifes. This wide flung experimentation is an expression of my sense of possibility. These works are an overview of this early period in my learning and creating.
