Pixetera

This may be a stretch in terms of a holiday link, but a good part of my Labor Day weekend was spent revisiting my career as a professional photographer specializing in corporate/industrial editorial assignments. A friend of mine had expressed interest in seeing samples from my commercial portfolio, most of which pre-dates the digital age and exists largely in slide form.

I hadn’t shown that work in more than 25 years, and since then, the presentation had gotten broken up in the course of 3 different house moves and a shift in career focus from business to higher ed. Putting something together for her involved emptying a closet full of cartons, spending hours going through boxes of slides amidst the resulting chaos (see below), and then more hours restoring order.

It all goes to prove that sometimes retirement still involves work!

(Click on image to enlarge.)

Title Slides from an Ancient Career Retrospective:

My first job in photography was painting a white bathroom black for use as a darkroom . . . or was it a black bathroom, white?

I rarely photograph people at work smiling. If work was really enjoyable, it wouldn’t be called work.

A professional photographer is one who makes every mistake in the book — once. After 16 years, I’m still an amateur.

Two of my favorite pieces of photographic equipment: Swiss Army knife (with toothpick); airplane air-sickness bags (good for separating each day’s exposed rolls of film).

Things go wrong so often on assignment, I now take it as a sign that things are going right. If there are no problems during a shoot, then I really begin to worry.

Photographing in cluttered, aging factory environments quickly gives rise to the aesthetic known as the “art of exclusion.”

The question I am most often asked: “Do you photograph women naked?” To which I reply: “I only take my clothes off when I bathe, sleep, or skinny dip.”