Stephen Cysewski: Wandering Photography Web Sites

I create photographs because I enjoy it. I attach myself to the world through photographs. I started taking photographs when I was a VISTA volunteer in Shaktoolik in 1967. I have continued to take photographs, with a few gaps because of family and career, since then.

The idea of Wandering in not an affectation, I love to immerse myself in situations that I respond to, I take photographs of what I respond to. My purpose is to show things the way they are, or really to show things the way that I see them. I want to share the diversity of my responses, humor, awe, beauty, disgust, irony, joy, and even boredom. I want to respond to a situation and not impose myself into it. On my web sites I show my photographs as a series of images, as they would be experienced by location and in some cases by time. I am not a conceptual photographer, I follow a more traditional path of responding to a situation with my feelings, values, and personality. I am interested in the ordinary the every day, and the mundane. When we look at old photographs it is not the scenic that we are moved by, it is the small ordinary details that resurrect memories.

I grow through the process of photography, the more I see the more I see! Photography is a cyclical process that leads to deeper insight and more appreciation of the world I experience. When I find a situation that excites me I go back again and again to experience it from different perspectives. I have three broad themes that I consistently photograph:

Buildings and structures that reveal peoples personality, eccentricy, history and beauty
People, their personality, and their relationships in public places
Natural form, line and juxtaposition

Many of my photographs of Fairbanks are inspired by the history of the “town photographer” Usually each community has a town photographer that defines a town at a specific period of time. Every Sunday, in the Fairbanks New Miner, they publish old photographs of Fairbanks. I want to provide the photographs that will document Fairbanks in its current time and place.

I have also visited and documented many different Alaskan town, towns in the Pacific Northwest, and towns in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Five years ago I was on sabbatical in Thailand. I have returned to Thailand many times and have also traveled in India. I approach my photography of India and Thailand with the same purpose, expressing my experience of a place, expressing things the way they are. I want to show how I experience my world and if I am true to that experience other people respond to it. I like it when people say "that is the way that it is."

Margaret's Oral History Interview

https://youtu.be/FL8hXRzh7YQ