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One Man Show: My 25 Years With Digital Photography
New Exhibit Will Show A Progression of Imagery

On April 28 I will open a month long one man show of my work: a 25 Year Digital Photography Retrospective. This will be held in the teeming metropolis of Beaufort NC near where I live -- just voted the best small town in the US -- with a huge population of about 4000. Nevertheless there will be a large space to fill at the Beaufort Art Center.

I say all this because putting a full blown show like this together is quite an experience. It is one thing to take photographs on a regular basis -- I try to shoot about 100 photographs a week -- and quite another thing to go through decades of work and try to make sense of it. To put this exhibit together I have had to view about 100,000 photographs which must be distilled down to several hundred photographs or 1 photograph for every 500 shot.

While the purpose of the exhibit will be to show a progression of work to the public, there is another factor that comes into play. An exhibit such as this forces me to look at the path I have taken and to try to grasp consciously what I was doing intuitively.

Dorothea Lange pointed out that few photographers really understand the value of their work taken over a long period of time. For example, this work becomes more valuable with the passage of time, as fashions change, children grow up, people die and communities evolve. While the art of photography is closely tied to time with the shutter speed freezing a moment onto film, the passage of time also is involved, as photographs age and acquire a meaning that they did not have when initially taken.

In my case I can now see a constant theme of movement in all of my work. As those of you know -- who have read my column before -- I take experimental slow shutter speed, often blurry, photographs of people and the world in motion in an effort to capture a sense of movement. I settled on this type of imagery about ten years ago.

But before that I made small looping gif animations from a series of still shots -- such as driving down the highway. I did this because my first commercial digital camera in 1998 was an extremely limited Casio which only took tiny photographs, with a fixed focus and small storage -- but it was state of the art at the time. Making animations out of small stills was one of the best experimental uses for this early digital camera and a way of capturing a sense of movement in the moment.
www.rickdoble.net/animate

And before that I spent years making a study of Muybridge's human figures in motion and reworking his landmark photographs into new digital images that were enlarged and colorised. It was a work I put together before digital photography was commercially available. I invented my own system and did this with software that I wrote for the inexpensive Radio Shack Color Computer (the CoCo).
www.rickdoble.net/exhibit

And another theme that jumped out when I reviewed my past work was that I was always experimenting -- pushing the photographic process to the limit -- by underexposing, for example or using odd angles or odd lighting.
www.rickdoble.net/thedigitalwaytoexperiment.html

So the two themes of motion and experimenting were there from the beginning -- and in particular the theme of motion and as it affected photographs of the human form and figure.
In addition I discovered that I had also laid out many of my primary motifs: musicians performing, night photos on the highway in the rain, shadows, neon, lights reflected in water at night and self portraits.
I now understand my current slow shutter speed photographs as a synthesis of all the work I did before, rather than a departure in a new direction. So today when I look at my last 25 years of digital work, I can see a fairly consistent path that led to the present day -- but if you had asked me at the time where I was going, I could not have told you.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Soren Kierkegaard

NOTE: See a list of my other articles here at PIXIQ. www.pixiq.com/contributors/rick-doble

For more about my approach to photography see my book: Experimental Digital Photography.

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