Hi, My name is George and I am a fine art photographer. Thank you for visiting my online portfolio.
I became interested in photography when I was quite young. My father had a 35mm SLR, my mother carried around a simple 110 camera much of the time, I would ride with my parents to the Fotomat drive-thru to drop off film and then go back the next day to pick up the prints. All of this fascinated me to no end: You put film into something that looked like a plastic brick, pressed a button several times, dropped off the film at a kiosk in the middle of a parking lot, and the next day you got the chance to travel back in time and hold memories in your hand on 4”x6” pieces of paper. Even more fascinating were the photos that weren’t quite representative of what we think of as reality. Strangely colored, blurry, grainy, and often just completely non-representational.
These images, the “mistakes”, were always my favorites because they allowed me to see the world differently and that was a very important thing to me. I had a brother, Paul, who was totally blind from birth but being blind didn’t mean he couldn’t see, he just saw the world differently. He saw with his ears and his nose and his fingertips. He didn’t use glasses to help him see better, he used a cane with a white tip. I wanted to see the world differently too, not in the same way as Paul, but in my own way, and I realized that cameras could help me do this.
Looking through a viewfinder changes what you see, different lenses give you different perspectives, different films force you to imagine what you will see instead of focusing on what you can see. A huge mountain gets flattened into a 2 dimensional sheet of paper that you can hold in your hand. Cameras allow us, even force us, to see things differently. Shooting on film doesn’t allow for instant gratification and that delay also changes how we see the image. The photographer can’t see the image they make in the exact same way as anyone else in the world will see it. Then there are the “mistakes”. The thing the photographer thought they saw comes back to them in a way they didn’t expect and that changes the narrative for that image completely. But every set of eyes and every brain that is linked to those eyes will come up with a different narrative for every photograph.
My goal is to provide a foundation for those narratives. My photos are intended to be a starting point for the individual viewing them. The viewer decides where the finish line is. I don’t want to tell someone what to see in my photos or how to see my photos, I want to help them find their own way of seeing, seeing my photos, and seeing the world in all of its 3 dimensional grand scale.