Every month a member of the Center for Photography at Madison (now known as PhotoMidwest) is invited to exhibit his or her photos in the gallery and make a presentation as “Photographer of the Month.” I should point out that this person is not chosen by a panel of dignified professional photographers, he or she just volunteers (often in response to a plea for more volunteers). This month I’m exhibiting some of my photographs at CPM. The title of my exhibit is “This is Not My Nature” and last night I gave a talk about my photography.
My talk was entitled “Photography is a Function of Life” and I touched on aspects of my life that influenced my photography like:
- Being asked by my aunt to take pictures when I went to summer school in Germany (she even lent me a camera since I didn’t own one);
- Buying my own Kodak Instamatic camera to take pictures around Madison;
- Buying my first 35-mm camera (Minolta SRT-101) and setting up my own darkroom for black-and-white photography;
- Traveling out west, living in a tent for almost a year, and getting into nature photography;
- Moving to the Pacific Northwest and being surrounded by an incredible variety of nature scenes;
- Trying digital photography and falling in love with the new technology; and
- Returning to Wisconsin to see all the things I missed when I lived here before.
I finished by saying that now that I’m retired I’m trying to look around more carefully and see more things, even things that are not nature. The purpose of my exhibit is to show some photos I’ve taken in the past few years that are definitely not my nature.
Some images from this exhibit are shown below. To see the full exhibit, look at the This is Not My Nature Book Preview.
(Click on any photo to enlarge, then use arrows to scroll through the images.)