WWelcome Welcome Welcome Welcome Welcome

 

Hello, and thanks for visiting my website.

This site is a showcase of some of my select photographs. It will be forever changing with new photos, so please visit often. My infatuation with photography began as a child. Watching the Polaroid's of the early 80's magically develop in front of my eyes, sparked a desire in me to learn this mystery of the still image. By the early 90's I was developing my own film and prints in Black and White. I fell in love with f-stops, apertures, safelights and depth of field. The slow process of calculating light, mixing chemicals and sunny days spent wasting boxes of photo paper in a dark turquoise bathroom, were my education, my meditations. When I started looking at the world through a camera lens was when the world slowed down to a crawl or I slowed down with it. The reality of every day life became clearer, more "focused" and meaningful. I felt a need to capture the beauty of life, the life we waltz through on the way to something else. Photography for me was a crash course in Zen Buddhism. Zen is the realization that the world is perfect in every way. There is no right or wrong. Everything is the way it should be at any particular moment. A photo is flash of enlightenment. A mirror, which reflects the whole world, in an instant. As a viewer of photography, you engage in the realization of the interconnectedness that is life. Whether it's a castle in Scotland, the human form or a lonely tree on a street corner in Seattle, we realize our place, our relation to all things.

In the past ten years I've dabled in different types of processes of photography. From straight black and white, toning, color, polaroid transfers, infrared and now some digital manipulations. What I've discovered is that it doesn't matter what medium you use, or what kind of camera or filter, it always comes down to the human elemant that you put into the art work. What f-stop or what digital patch was used to create an image doesn't mean squat. It's the final image that makes a statement or doesn't that matters. The love and dedication that is put into something that may not mean a damn thing to anyone else in the world, but you think it's cool.

An image is just an image. Or is it? It's a memory, an emotion, it's mortal and imortal, it's a rare and treasured piece of art or it's a snapshot of the family dog never to be developed. It's a poem that's only read to a lover or shared with millions. This is what I've chosen to do with my images, is share them with the world, through this media giant. How do you charge someone for hours and hours of your time that's put into something you enjoyed doing? That you gave part of your life up to create. Art is priceless. It does have monetary value based on material cost and supply and demand. But to me, an image is something that I've taken from life played around with and then passed it on to the viewer.

So Enjoy for now!!!

 

Mark Blanchard