Set out for a short urban decay shoot this morning only to find out a couple of homeless have taken possession of the building. I did shoot for a while but left ... didn't feel comfortable with the idea of invasion of privacy although no one was there.
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Sarah Ellis and Betcee May in a fun and not so controlled moment ... priceless !
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I was asked recently when I picked up photography and what the appeal was at the time. I had to think about that one.
As long as I can remember I was fascinated with camera's and I owned at various times during my childhood and teenager years a couple of cheap plastic film camera's that never performed. (110 format and 6 x 6 ~ Diana I believe ...) In those days I didn't have the money either to buy film and process it.
Fast forward to 1978. I started collaborating with Peter Beyls, modern artist extra-ordinaire ... computer music, computer graphics ... I developed a ton of hardware for our joint projects over the years and Peter was crucial in my development as an electronic music medium artist.
Peter always documented his work with the camera and I've seen a ton of great B&W images in his studio. I used to have quite a few of his pictures of him and me taken during various concerts or interactive collaboration efforts. Unfortunately, I lost all of these during the various moves I went through. For sure Peter made me take attention of the power of B&W photography and also the various cultural modernist movements in the US. Peter was already well traveled and extremely well spoken in the 70's. (I recommend reading his short bio)
In the 1982-1983 time frame I developed a digital image capture interface that connected to a analog video camera and we were able to digitize analog video signals and come up with a digital, monochrome, image on the computer screen. There were no printers in those days that could handle the output of the Seiko multi-processor unit (pre-PC) we were using ... so I had to buy a 35mm film camera to capture the output of the screen ... hilarious if one thinks about this in 2008 technology.
The rest is history ... I've always owned a camera since then and I've been tremendously active in the full digital imaging processing chain. Developed computer hardware, camera's and software in the field.
Both our 8 channel computer controlled synthesizer Peter talks about in his bio and the camera system above were featured in the television program "IJsbreker" for the Belgian and Dutch National Television in 1985. There's somewhere a video excerpt floating around on the internet of Peter and me taking down an environmental art installation in MOMA Ghent in 1985. Would love to get my hands on that segment.
Continued ...
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