Darrel Ellis

"During his lifetime, Darrel Ellis created a large body of work that was based on family photographs taken by his father, who suffered a brutal death at the hands of careless police officers a month before Ellis was born."
"Working from his father’s photographs, Ellis reworks the imagery, translating it into paintings or drawings, or re-photographing the work and creating collages."(Art In General)

"Ellis used these photographs as the basis for paintings, drawings and photographs that manipulate the imagery through projections on to plaster sculptural reliefs which are then rephotographed and often translated into representational paintings." (Julie Saul Gallery)

Supporting Gallery: http://www.saulgallery.com/chronicle/darrel_ellis.html

I am not as surprised at how many artists use found, family imagery, as I am about how different each artist represents this idea. I have looked at Lorie Novak, Shimon Attie, Deborah Willis, and Cedric Smith, just to name a few. Darrel Ellis is my most recent discovery. He was introduced to his family photographs in the 1980's, after his father's death. Since then, he has used these photographs in many different ways. He has rephotographed, drawn, painted, sculpted from these images to make his own statement.
The first three images were taken from an exhibit of Ellis's. the second set of three are from a series titled, Family Distortions.
This title could very well be the title of my current series. I find it interesting that so many artists feel the need use old family imagery and distort it or change it in some way. The result is usually ambiguous, mysterious, and dark. I had this exact urge with my current work. I was not familiar with any of these artists before I started my research. My ideas and visions were my own. I was not directly inspired by any specific artist before I started.
Although I have many of the same ideas and concepts, as well as some of the same processes, my work doesn't look like any one artist's work. My way of looking at this family imagery is unique and personal. Each artist I have researched has a completely different way of working. Each series of each artist is it's own unique creation.

Deborah Willis

Bio:
Deb Willis has an affiliated appointment with the College of Arts and Sciences, Africana Studies. She was a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow and Fletcher Fellow, and a 2000 MacArthur Fellow, as well as the 1996 recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation award. She has pursued a dual professional career as an art photographer and as one of the nation's leading historians of African American photography and curator of African American culture. Exhibitions of her work include: A Sense of Place, Frick, University of Pittsburgh, 2005; Regarding Beauty, University of Wisconsin, 2003; Embracing Eatonville, Light Works, Syracuse, NY, 2003-4; Hair Stories, Scottsdale Contemporary Art Museum, Scottsdale, AZ 2003-4; The Comforts of Home, Hand Workshop Art Center, Richmond, VA, 1999; Re/Righting History: Counter narratives by Contemporary African-American Artists, Katonah Museum of Art, 1999; Memorable Histories and Historic Memories, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 1998; Cultural Baggage, Rice University, Houston, TX, 1995. Her curated Exhibitions include: Engulfed by Katrina: Photographs before and After the Storm, Nathan Cummings Foundation, and Imagining Families—Images and Voices and Reflections in Black.

I came across Deborah Willis while looking at some of Lorie Novak's work. Willis was mentioned in an article in "Scholar and Feminist Online", which discussed Lorie Novak's work. Her work is part of a world wide web exhibit created by Novak, called Collected Visions. Willis's "The Familial Gaze" was part of this exhibit.
The second picture above is what caught my eye. I have come across huge group of artists who work mainly with concepts of nostalgia family history. Deborah Willis's style and concept reminds of Cedric Smith's work, an artist I researched last semester for senior portfolio.

"Smith’s color photographs, all modestly sized and priced, feature the same sort of old-fashioned studio portraiture of black subjects, each vintage print pointedly re-photographed in front of a Southern landscape: A nervous-looking young man in his Sunday best is placed at a church’s entry, a startled child finds herself perched atop a fat cotton boll." (Art and Antiques)

Cedric Smith: http://cedricsmith.com/html/homepage.htm

I am very interested in how different artists explore family history and memory. Each artist has their own style and concept. They go anout reaching a common goal, but work in very diferent ways.

Tina Barney

"Tina Barney is best known for her ongoing documentation of the lifestyles and relationships of her family and close friends, many of whom belong to the social elite of New York and New England. Barney’s style is part candid, part tableau; her subject matter raises in equal measure issues of privilege and the interaction of family members. While striving for the candidness of a snapshot, Barney became one of the first artists working in the 1980s to explore a “directorial” mode of making pictures. Her decision to direct her subjects stems in part from her choice to sacrifice the nimble freedom of a 35 millimeter camera (with which she began her photographic career) for the large format camera’s ability to deliver a more detailed rendering of the trappings of wealth so integral to depicting her subjects and their environment. Her direction ranges from posing her subjects to simply asking them to repeat a spontaneous gesture, and her style of working often includes careful lighting and the help of an assistant. The effect is an unexpectedly intimate access to her subjects." (Museum of Contemporary Art)

Website of Supporting Museum: http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent
/barney_tina.php

I have looked to Barney's work for inspiration in past projects. Although her style and technique is much different than what I am doing with my current work, her basic thoughts and ideas that fuel her work are somewhat similar.
Her photographs capture that which outsiders cannot see. Her pictures let us in to people's live that we would not, under normal circumstances, be able to view. While some of her pictures are portraits, where the subject locks eyes with viewer, others are much more intimate. These more intimate, environmental photographs capture families in their personal, private moments.
It seems that people never tire of being bale to look into other people's lives. We get a glimpse of what life is like for someone else. The viewer can relate to the subjects and their environments .
The photographs study what is familiar to all people. Even though the viewer does not have any emotional or personal relationships with the subjects in the photographs, the viewer is still captured by the work.. There is still interest in the pictures, even though the viewer is not in any way related to the people.
I am usually drawn to photographs of family. Such as Sally Mann, Diane Arbus, Callahan, and Barney. I am drawn to these artists because their work is personal. I also tend to focus on my family in my work. I feel a deeper connection to my work when I am working with family imagery. This work has been criticized before. The question of why would anyone be interested in looking at pictures of your family. It doesn't mean anything to them. I disagree. I feel that we can all relate to family imagery. We all have a natural interest and curiosity in the lives's of others.

Lorie Novak (Installations)

Website: >http://cvisions.nyu.edu/Novak/

Shows,Galleries,Exhibitions:
ArtSway, Hampshire, England; The International Center for Photography, NY; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Houston Center for Photography; Breda Fotografica, the Netherlands; Jayne Baum Gallery, NY; University Art Museum, Cal. State Univ. Long Beach; Addison Gallery, Andover, MA; Stanford University Art Museum.

COLLECTED VISIONS I is a three part slide and music installation that examines the representation of women and girls in family photographs. These photographs were collected from approximately 100 women from varied backgrounds and different generations.

I wrote about Lorie Novak in a blog earlier this semester. I decided to look at her again to see how she installed her work. This installation really stood out. I have thought about using a projector to show my work. I love seeing the silhouettes of the viewers interacting with the work. It also just seems fitting to show this type of work with a projector. My Great Grandfather showed these home movies on a large screen with his family and the still pictures thta are in the movies were taken from a slide projector. I would love to be able to do this. Although, at the moment I don't know if I have the time or resources to do this.

Another thing I found interesting about this project was the way she talked about her work. It reminded me a lot of what I have been thinking of while working in this project.
"Subtleties of gaze and gesture become clues for how girls find their voices, and the layering of images within and between sequences emphasizes the complexities of representation."
While working with these images of my Grandmother and mother I can see the slight movements and gestures that show uneasiness. It seems that they are trying to find their voices, as mentioned by Novak.

I will continue to look at Novak's work for installation ideas and inspiration.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Rossetti Family Photograph Album

Artist's Collection at National Portrait Gallery Website:
http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait.php?search=ap&set=184%3BRossetti+Family+Photograph+Album&page=1&rNo=3

These are photographs of albumen prints form the 1800's. I know that this is not a modern artist, but I was very interested in his work. Rossetti was an artist and poet. He dealt mostly with drawing but spent some time working with photography.
I found it interesting that Rossetti took the time to photograph drawings. I know that this was done at the time, when photography was a rather new art form, for artistic as well as more functional purposes. These photographs look like more than just documents of drawings. The fading and distortion makes the artist's hand much more noticeable.
I found the process to be very interesting and not too different from what I am doing with my work. I especially like the first and third picture on my post because of the fading and distortion.
Even though these are drawings, the photographs make the people and scenes in the drawings look more realistic. Taking a photograph of a drawing almost makes the drawing come to life; it gives them a sense of space and time. It puts breath into the drawings.
I feel like this about my work. The videos I am using have their own sort of life. They are moving images of moments in history. Photographing these moving images brings them to life again. Some of the photographs form videos look as if they were taken first hand.
It is interesting to see that a artist in the 19th Century was possibly working with some of the same concepts as I am. The same basic concepts are very clear between my work and the work of Rossetti: reinventing something for a new purpose and taking something found and making it into your own meaningful piece of art.

Benoy K. Behl

Photo 1: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/01/india-ancient-art/map-interactive

Photo 2: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/01/india-ancient-art/behl-photography.html

Photo 3: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/01/india-ancient-art/behl-photography.html

Website: http://www.benoykbehl.com/

Benoy K. Behl has worked on documenting ancient paintings in the Ajanta caves in India, using only natural light. Behl has also visited many more sites in India, Thailand, Indonesia, and Myanmar. He is interested in much more than just documenting for historical purposes only. He was compelled to do this work to "convey the essence and harmony which underlies all of creation."

His work has been shown in National Geographic and the National Museum at New Dehli.

I was very interested in Behl's work because of it's ties to Hinduism and Buddhism. I have only begun to scrape the surface of the different philosophies of these religion,s but am very interested in how they relate to my work.
What caught my attention at first was just the fact that for thousands of years people have been using art to understand the world around them. And for hundreds of years artists, historians, philosphers, and anthropologists have been studying the art of other cultures and generations to understand the world around them as well.
While looking at these photographs I began to see some similarities with my current project. Thousands of years ago people were painting pictures to learn, understand, and remember their stories, beliefs, and memories. This is not much different from families recording their special moments to remember and understand their life and their world. While looking at my family movies I learn more about my history, my family, and my life. I can draw similarities between my Grandmother, my Mother, and myself. I see similarities in gestures and expressions. This helps me to better understand my family members. It helps me to rememberthe past and enables me to put a picture to certain stories that I have heard from my family members.

Another thing that I found to be interesring was the first photograph I posted on this blog,by Bruce Dale. This is an image of Benoy K. Behl in one of his photography sites. His figure is translucent, and ghostlike. This reminded me of the work done by Lorie Novak. She used her figure, translucent and ghostlike as well, with some of her family photographs. This is something that I have played around with. It seems people have the urge to not only look and understand the past but to make themselves a part of it. This is basic human psychology. No one wants to think of the world without them, we are all afraid of death. We are unable to comprehend death, the unknown is impossoible to fully understand. In this same way it seems that in order to understand the past, we tend to have the need to put ourselves into the past.

Lorie Novak

Website:
http://cvisions.cat.nyu.edu/novak/index.html

Galleries/Shows/Exhibitions:
ArtSway, Hampshire, England; The International Center for Photography, NY; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Houston Center for Photography; Breda Fotografica, the Netherlands; Jayne Baum Gallery, NY; University Art Museum, Cal. State Univ. Long Beach; Addison Gallery, Andover, MA; Stanford University Art Museum. Her work has been in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC.; Art Institute of Chicago; and The Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach, FL.



I was very surprised to find Lorie Novak's work. Her work has a lot of similarities with mine. Even some of her installations were similar to certain ideas I had about installing my work for a final exhibition. She works with old family photographs by incorporating them into new photographs. She seems to do this my combining the old picture with an original of hers or she places the old photograph into a certain environment, her personal space. In some of her pictures there may be a glare on the old photograph. You can see a window, trees, or someones face in the glare. This brings the past (the old family photograph) into the present.
This is something I have been thinking about while working with family films and the television. I was toying with the idea of bringing myself into the old film stills by using the glare from light on the screen. I may feel that this is too readily understood, too obvious for what I am trying to do. Looking at Novak's work made think about this possibility again. Seeing the glare in her images make me take a closer, longer look at the picture. It doesn't seem quite as obvious as I would have imagined. I find myself looking for a figure or some sort of image in the glare. Rather than making the work too obvious, it makes it a bit more mysterious.
I am very pleased with finding this photographer. It is interesting to see someones present day work that so closely resembles mine.

Kathe Kollwitz

Kathe Schmidt Kollwitz (July 8, 1867 – April 22, 1945) was a German painter, print maker, and sculptor whose work offered an eloquent and often searing account of the human condition in the first half of the 20th century. (Wikipedia)

Review of Work:
http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2007/05/14/desperation_rage_and_the_ravages_of_war/

Shown In:
National Gallery of Art, D.C.
Portland Museum of Art

Much of Kollwitz's work deals with war, poverty, and political uprising. What struck me most about her work, was the way in which she commented on these subjects. They are not strictly political pieces, there is another element in her work. Her drawings and prints are intimate and personal. She depicts the private moments of desperation between mothers, fathers, and children who were affected by war, poverty, and politics.
Her images are horrifying in that they show humans at their most fearful and dark states. These are images that reach out and have a strong emotional affect on the viewer. One can see the worry and trauma in the faces and body language of the subjects in her drawings, paintings, and prints.
Much of her work was influenced by the expressionist movement. Her quick strokes and sketchy lines provoke a sense of immediacy in getting the image and information down. The emotions present at the time are not only visible in the faces of those in the pictures, but also in the hand of the artist.
I am interested in studying Kollwitz's work because of the real, raw human emotion that she provokes with her style. As with Cassatt, I am also interested in the way she uses expressionism in many of her pieces.

Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt's drawings, paintings,and prints focus mainly on women in their everyday lives, with a concentration on women as mothers and their children . Her images are often of intimate, personal moments. Many of her images are of recognizable, comforting, and familiar everyday events.

Artist's Website Through National Gallery of Art:
http://www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/ggcassattptg/ggcassattptg-main2.html#overview

Review:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B03E1D9133DF934A35751C1A9659C8B63

Galleries and Museums:
National Gallery of Art

I first started to look at Mary Cassatt's work when I was in elementary school. I was constantly fascinated by her imagery, maybe because it was familiar and comforting. Many of her images are intamate portraits of women and children. Recently I began to look at her work again in relation to my project. My imagery deals with family and their most precious and personal moments. At first her imagery is what struck me, the actual subjects. After taking a longer look I began to pay more attention to her choice of colors and brushstrokes. She spent most of her life in Paris, and studied with Degas. Naturally, her style was largely influenced by French Impressionism. Her whispy, quick brushstrokes give a sense of immediacy. Her work isn't just about conveying the time and events that were taking place, but rather the feelings and emotions that were present in those private moments. This struck me as being similar to some of the pictures I have taken from my family videos. Each picture is a moment, frozen in time. One only gets the impression of that moment through my images. This is partly because of the distortion from the image being transferred from film to video, to tv screen and then back onto film or onto digital. In many of these photographs the image is hazy and sometimes hard to read. Even with this distortion, one gets a sense of emotion from the image. Impressionist were interested with recording the moment and the emotional charge of that moment, without adding intricate detail of the environment and subject. This is what I hope to accomplish with my work.

Richard Bilingham

Bilingham is most recognized for his series on his mother and father, Liz and Ray. He began taking photographs of his parents to use as reference material for his paintings. These photographs eventually formed a series and a book, called "Ray's a Laugh."

A quote from Bilingham on this series:
'it's not my intention to shock, to offend, sensationalise, be political or whatever, only to make work that is as spiritually meaningful as I can make it - in all these photographs I never bothered with things like the negatives. some of them got marked and scratched. I just used the cheapest film and took them to be processed at the cheapest place. I was just trying to make order out of chaos.'

Interview:
http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/T/turner_2001/RichardBillinghamMain.htm

The Closest I could get to a Web Site:
http://www.designboom.com/eng/funclub/billingham.html
or
http://www.arken.dk/content/us/arkens_collection/photography_and_graphics/richard_billingham

Galleries and Museums:
Museum of Modern Art, New York. Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London

MOMA on Bilingham:
http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/1996/newphoto12/index.html

I have been working with old family film footage for my senior portfolio project. I am interested in family history and interaction. My goal is to capture the rare and private family moments and show both the the beautiful and the darker aspects of these moments. I like the candid, raw, and unfiltered look of Bilingham's work on his parents. I can see both horror and a sort of raw beauty in his work. I find it interesting to see how other present day artists are representing their families through their art.

Cedric Smith

Review: http://www.artandantiques.net/Articles/Photography/Cedric-Smith.asp

Supporting Gallery: http://www.dillongallery.com/index.php?p=exhibits&id=archive&exh=200704_playing_god&i=23

Web Site: http://cedricsmith.com/html/homepage.htm

Bio: "Cedric Smith was born in Philadelphia in 1970. He grew up in Thomaston, Georgia, where he moved with his family when he was a young boy. He currently resides in Atlanta, Ga.
Smith is a self-taught artist who while eschewing the “so-called rules of art”, has created a personal genre of work. He draws on a wide range of influences and sources, both traditional and contemporary, and which include landscape art, pop art, brand advertising and photography to express his poignant observations of life in the rural south. A prolific artist, Smith works with a honed discipline on his compositions, seamlessly morphing photographic images into his richly textured pieces, applying and removing layers and lettering.
Much of his current work is devoted to redressing an observation that dogged him as a child - the absence of Blacks in advertising and on the labels of popular brands." (aviscafineart.com)

New Work: "Smith’s color photographs, all modestly sized and priced, feature the same sort of old-fashioned studio portraiture of black subjects, each vintage print pointedly re-photographed in front of a Southern landscape: A nervous-looking young man in his Sunday best is placed at a church’s entry, a startled child finds herself perched atop a fat cotton boll." (Art and Antiques)

Smith's work deals with bringing images from the past and using them in the present for his art. He is using these old black and white photographs, not taken by him, and making them into something unique and original. He is giving these pictures a new life and a new voice and making it something he can call his own. I thought it was interesting to give these people in the photographs a second chance at being heard. Having their portraits re-done. I felt that I could relate to this project. He is redefining these portraits for what he is trying to say, just as I am using my family videos to explore thoughts and make my own statement in the present.

Jaques Henri Lartigue

"Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true."

Bio- "Jacques Lartigue was born in Courbevoie on June 13, 1894. He took his first photographs at the age of six, using his father’s camera, and started keeping what would become a lifelong diary. In 1904 he began making photographs and drawings of family games and childhood experiences, also capturing the beginnings of aviation and cars and the smart women of the Bois de Boulogne as well as society and sporting events. An unfailingly curious amateur, he tried out all the available techniques, tirelessly recording the fleeting moments and meticulously arranging his several thousand images in large albums." (Official Web Site)

Supporting Galleries/Museums/Magazines- Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Life, and Museum of Modern Art

Article- http://www.slate.com/id/2106598/

I have always been a fan of Lartigue's work. I loved his quote about how photography is catching a true moment in time. I am hoping to capture a moment in time with my project. Although I am capturing pieces of my family history that I was not able to witness, I still feel that these moments are true and pure. Lartigue worked on his photography for most of his life. In the end he had a sort of family album. His photography was a family history.
I have also always been drawn to "old fashioned" pictures. I love how the people, clothes, cars, and cities looked back then. Taking pictures from my family videos, that were shot in the 1930's, is my way of being able to photograph what is impossible to photograph.

Friedrich began filmmaking in 1978 and has produced and directed eighteen 16mm films and videos.

Review:http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/friedrich.html

Galeries:Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art.

Su Friedrich's films, such as "First Comes Love", investigate the political and cultural ideals of modern society. In First Comes Love, Friedfrich makes her commentary on the issue of gay marriage through personal "home" movies of four dfferent coupled getting married. I chose to dicuss her work because I am impressed at her ability to combat this issue with a personal piece of art. Although the movie may sound simple enough, four couples and four weddings, what she is saying is much bigger than that. I was alos very drawn to her fiml stills. I have started to really like the grainy, blurry, dream like quality you get from film stills. I was very pleased with how some of the pictures I took from my home videos turned out. When you take an image from a moving image there's a lot behind that one picture that isn't completely recognizable by the viewer. It has a mysterioius quality. Seems to take time out of the linear.

Alan Berliner

"Alan Berliner's uncanny ability to combine experimental cinema, artistic purpose, and popular appeal in compelling film essays has made him one of America's most acclaimed independent filmmakers"(Web Site).

"As an independent filmmaker, Alan Berliner has dedicated the majority of his work to the legacy of the family album and the personal histories embedded within names" (Walker Art Center)

Statement-" I tell personal stories. I work from what I know. You can use the personal to explore very broad, wide-ranging kinds of experience relating to identity. I try to make my films windows and mirrors for the experience that I’m exploring and allow people to see themselves in aspects of the film or to learn about parts of the broader types of experience I’m exploring through the film. I want to try to touch everybody with the warm and friendly shock of recognition."

Review- http://www.ce-review.org/kinoeye/kinoeye23old2.html

Interview- http://www.filmfestivalstv.com/sanfrancisco/2006/05/wide_awake_with.html

Web Site- http://www.alanberliner.com/index.html

Photos- http://www.alanberliner.com/photo/photo.html

Supporting Galleries- Walker Art Center Minneapolis, MN , Museum of Modern Art, International Center of Photography

Berliner's statement about touching people through recognition is what caught my attention. I have not yet seen any of his film, but plan to do so very soon. At the moment my project is focused on my personal story and my family history. The home movies that I am working with are all dealing with subject matter that can be recognized by everyone. What also caught my attention was Berliner's statement about working with the personal to in order to explore a broader range of topics, such as identity. My project is still in its beginnings. Berliner's films and statement about his work are inspiring. I can relate to what he says about his work and using the personal experience to make a bigger statement.

John Reuter

Web Site- http://www.johnreuter.com/index.html

Bio And Explanation of Work- John Reuter was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1953. He was raised in California and moved to New York to attend SUNY Geneseo. It was there that he began to study photography and art.
"Internationally known artist John Reuter has had a consistent approach to photography since the early 1970s. He works with a variety of media to transform an existing reality into something else. Usuallly his subject matter either involves the human figure and its interaction with its surroundings, or emphasizes an emotional state." Reuter's moste recent images are digital collages constructed from nineteenth-century portraits that he found in thrift shops and combined with backgrounds from Ellis Island and the Lower East SideTenement Museum, Where he sought Detiorated rooms." (Kathleen Thormond Carr)

Interview-

http://www.johnpaulcaponigro.com/lib/artists/reuter.php

Supporting Galleries- Museum of Modern Art

Jock Sturges

Bio: Jock Sturges is a fine art photographer based in San Francisco, California. Best known for his nudes and extended portraits of families in Northern California counter-culture communities and on European naturist beaches, his large format images borrow significantly from classical periods in both photography and nineteenth and early twentieth century painting. Represented by 16 galleries in six countries, Sturges' work is also to be found in the collection of many of the world's museums including The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and The Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art in Germany.

Artist Statement: "My work is all about relationship and people whom I've known for a really long time. I'm fond of saying that 99 percent of my time as a photographer is not spent taking pictures; it's spent doing the social work that makes the pictures possible -- spending time with people, knowing who they are, helping them with different aspects of their lives, eating together, knowing them. And that makes the pictures possible"

Interview 1: http://www.amadelio.com/vlog/2008/01/10/vlog-videoblog-jock-sturges-line-of-beauty-and-grace

Interview 2: http://www.johnpaulcaponigro.com/lib/artists/sturges.php

Supporting Gallery: http://www.bernarduccimeisel.com/artistBio.php?id_artist=22

Sturges printing style is what caught my eye at first. I like the sepia toned prints and the vingetting on some of his pictures. Very Sall Mann like. His prints are seamless. The tones are beautiful. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that he works with large format cameras. I was also very drawn to his subject matter. All of his portraits are very personal. You can see that he is showing more than beauty. There is more emotional depth to his work.