Shooting exclusively, with my iPhone camera, for me, at this stage and state of my life and career, is like a grande homecoming of sorts.
It’s a triumphant and storied return and welcoming back, to the once undefined and unrefined ideals and ideas of what and why I got into photography in the first place not just to own and operate a photographic business but to live a photographic life.
From the very first time I had a camera in my hand, my mission was childlike simple-to create art, to express my creativity, to find my own voice that was different than my parents, siblings, friends, classmates, colleagues.
I wanted the camera to be a natural and organic extension of who I was in the world and not just something I did in the world.
I somehow managed, for the most part, through the decades of client assignments, creative briefs, deadlines, vaporizing budgets, to keep this mission spark alive.
Blissfully so, my photographic ambitions, determinations, and inspirations now, after all these years, with just a lowly and beloved phone camera in hand and heart, seem so much purer to me, uncomplicated, unadulterated, less convoluted.
The spark is back to a flame.
I want to create art in everyday, timeworn, overlooked, commonplace… cracks, creases, and crevices of time and space.
I want to honor, treasure, celebrate, memorialize the moments and memories of life’s princely emotions, events, and experiences.
I want to leave a legacy, a body-of-work, for all to see, of what exactly in this world, I recognized and recorded as beautiful, lyrical, sensual, delightful, irresistible.
As a career commercial photographer and as many here that have made a living in photography would tell you, photography, for the most part, is all about using your photographic ingenuity, innovation, and inventiveness to tell someone else stories.
Stories that were, btw, mostly governed and influenced by young and zealous art directors and art buyers who were primarily and principally catering to a narrowly defined audience demographic and psychographic.
Now, so gratefully, with these commercial restraints far behind me in the rear-view mirror, I want to, now, today, use these very same assets, given to me by both nature and nurture, to tell my own story. Period.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not in the least suggesting, or even hinting, that my big-camera career was irksome or burdensome. It wasn’t. It was delightful beyond measure and imagination. Truly. I am so very grateful and humbled by my years behind the camera.
What I’m trying to say is that, now, on this side of the fence, is that I’m able to agreeably and pleasurably take, all I learned in the big-camera space, and apply the same tools, technique, talent, and technology, to my iPhone photography, with unrestrained freedom and Joie de vivre that I’ve never known before.
I am finally home.
Click
Jack
