The speed of change in the world of photography during the first decade of this century was astounding. Ten years prior, I'd had conversations with my grandfather about photography - he'd gotten a "miniature" Leica in the mid 1930s and spent a good portion of his life making photographs. His understanding of photography and mine, before 2000, were about the same; photography had not changed very much. The basic principles of shooting film and going into a darkroom were consistent.
Between 2000 and 2010, all of that evaporated with amazing speed. Kodak and Fuji, the makers of the two films that I used most often, stopped producing those films - and radically reorganized their companies. Cibachrome - previously, a museum standard for archival color printing - stopped being made. Ivey, where I worked until 2008, stopped offering one service after another. In August of 2008, I left Ivey to begin my "other life" both pursuing a Master's in technology and beginning to work in tech fields, and later that year Ivey shuttered its doors.
I continued to make the digital urbansurfaces images, coveting bigger and better digital equipment. I graduated my first small digital Nikon camera for a sharper and slightly larger image size in a tiny Leica. Image sizes were still too small to print.
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This group of images are all relatively baroque, relying on more dramatic texture, color, and contrast.
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