theme- examples

For me looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. Place is found by walking, direction determined by weather and season. I take the opportunity each day offers: if it is snowing, I work in snow, at leaf-fall it will be leaves; a blown over tree becomes a source of twigs and branches.

Movement, change, light growth and decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue.

The energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and the space within. The weather—rain, sun, snow, hail, calm—is that external space made visible. When I touch a rock, I am touching and working the space around it. It is not independent of its surroundings and the way it sits tells how it came to be there. In an effort to understand why that rock is there and where it is going, I must work with it in the area in which I found it.

I have become aware of raw nature is in a state of change and how that change is the key to understanding. I want my art to be sensitive and alert to changes in material, season and weather. Often I can only follow a train of thought while a particular weather condition persists. When a change comes, the idea must alter or it will, and often does, fail. I am sometimes left stranded by a change in the weather with half-understood feelings that have to travel with me until conditions are right for them to appear. All forms are to be found in nature, and there are many qualities within any material. By exploring them I hope to understand the whole. My work needs to include the loose and disordered within the nature of material as well as the tight and regular.

At its most successful, my ‘touch’ looks into the heart of nature; most days I don’t even get close. These things are all part of the transient process that I cannot understand unless my touch is also transient—only in this way can the cycle remain unbroken and the process complete. I cannot explain the importance to me of being part of the place, its seasons and changes. Fourteen years ago I made a line of stones in Morecambe Bay. It is still there, buried under the sand, unseen. All my work still exists in some form.

My approach to photograph is kept simple, almost routine. All work, good and bad, is documented. I use standard film, a standard lens and no filters. Each work grows, strays, decays—integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its height, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expresses in the image. Process and decay are implicit.

Professional photographer

Elliott Erwitt

To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place... I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them. You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what's around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy. When you can make someone laugh and cry, alternately, now that's the highest of all possible achievements.

I rarely stage pictures. I wait for them... let them take their own time.

Student examples: click here

Professional examples: see below

Professional photographer

ATYL (Alex Lee)

Chicago, IL

I grew up in a Hong Kong where neon lights meant advancement and advancement meant prosperity. People then were afraid to slow down, for fear that opportunities would pass

them by. I remember waiting for dusk and watching the garish neon light up the city, and thinking they were beautiful in a strangely eerie sort of way. And I recall going home at

night and sitting on the upper deck of the bus, watching out the window while the colorful lights blurred by. I grew up thinking I needed to do everything faster lest I ran out of time.

Now that I’m an adult, juggling life and work with my art, I sometimes wonder how much experiences and opportunities I’ve missed while rushing by. How much do I really see?

Often, by the time I noticed something, it is not much more than a ghostly memory captured by my subconscious. But can I stop and slow down and observe life as it passes by?

Should I? For even blurred, the night lights are still beautiful, still captivating…