Spencer's the Man!

I just posted this on my 'studio' site and I don't plan on duplicating my blogs too often, but I thought this was worth posting. This is from a Bar Mitzvah that I shot this past weekend at the Rittenhouse Hotel. How well these jobs go usually depends on a lot of things, but none more important than the personality of those in the lead role(s).
This kid was cool. His name is Spencer and we hit it off right from the start. While I'm sure Spence was pretty cool at any age, thirteen is one of those ages that your walking the tight rope of still being a goofy kid and starting to merge into the grown up world...for better or worse. It was fun to see. He was a cool kid and an impressive young man.

Why Blogger?

I was telling a friend a couple weeks back that I planned to start writing a blog. Of course, the first question was 'what was I going to blog about.' Sadly I didn't have an answer for him and I'm still not 100 percent sure of my motivation here.

I have given it more thought in recent weeks and here's what I've come up with.  I'm launching this blog at the same time as my new website JIMHARRISIMAGES.COM. Most of you have already seen my business website featuring my wedding and studio work. This is different. This is my back catalog of documentary works. A lot of you have been to my exhibitions over the years featuring these images. Many of you have them hanging on your walls. They are familiar works. The Coal People photographs...the Africa material...the school projects we've done in Philadelphia. The images I captured while we lived in LA. It's a little overwhelming when you try to put it in one place. Your whole life, creative-life and otherwise, in one place. That's what this new website is. It's my photography and travels over the past 20 years or so. This blog is an extension of that and an opportunity to comment on the stories behind the pictures.

I've exhibited my pictures wherever someone has given me the space to do so. I've taken a traveling exhibit overseas and presented the images at various conferences. I've had solo exhibitions in white walled galleries and I've hung shows in shop windows in small Pennsylvania mining towns. I've had them in juried shows, retail stores and coffee shops. They all took time to assemble and present. This website is no different. Instead of hours in the darkroom, I have scanned all the original negatives and worked on the files with the same diligence as my original silver prints. I've also made all the images available for sale on this site. Keep it in mind when shopping for that special someone. I've always felt that more households could use pictures of coal miners and Basotho herd boys hanging on the walls.

As a photographer, it's been an interesting path in recent years. I was educated and trained as an analog photographer. No computers...just film, darkroom skills and heavy cameras. Since my last retrospective show, Picture Stories, the industry has gone completely digital...and I have too. My enlarger is covered in plastic in the basement and I don't think it's coming back out. It's an interesting bridge to have crossed. I don't know if it's better...  but it's a different way of shooting, I know that. 

For example, when I went to Africa I took a huge bag of film with me. I shot everyday for about 4 months. I came home with 30 rolls of film and it seemed like a lot of images at the time. Maybe 1,000 pictures. That's a dozen shots a day. Can you imagine being in Africa with a digital camera and shooting twelve shots a day? I suppose the 'decisive moment' still exists, you just get more of steady crack at it these days.

So...this blog...

It's just another document. A photo-centric journal of where I've been and where we're at now. The old analog b&w negs and the new digital images. A journal of what we see and the pictures that turn into stories and the stories that turn into pictures. Our family, friends, acquaintances, travel, concerts, dogs... spring flowers and summer bbqs, autumn football and winter blizzards. Our joys and concerns and whatever else comes along. I suspect there will be more photographs than words, but you never know. I've managed to ramble pretty well right out of the gate with this piecemeal mission statement.

I'd appreciate it if you humored me and bookmarked this blog and checked in from time to time. I'm sure you have more ridiculous bookmarks in your folder than this one. I know I do.

Basotho Herd Boy

Okay, I figured this would be a fitting picture to start out with after a lengthy justification of my right to blog...

I actually would have taken more pictures in Lesotho but I ran out of film. My friend Jud and I made more than a couple trips to the post office to see if my expected film shipment had arrived from the States. It never did and by the last couple weeks I was shooting high speed 3200 film in some serious African sunlight. These shots are grainy, but still effective. I don't typically title my pictures, but I usually refer to this one as 'Serious Joy'. In two shots it sums up how we'd like to be viewed in a photograph...and how we really are sometimes.

Ron Juliette wrote about 'the photographers perspective' in the forward for my last exhibition. I've posted it on the website. Much of what he writes about makes me think about these two images.