Intro to Fine-Art Black & White Photography: Notes & Musings [PDF]

Intro to Fine-Art Black & White Photography : Notes & Musings
by Andy Ilachinski







I am, by training and profession, a physicist, specializing in nonlinear dynamics and complex adaptive systems (with a PhD in theoretical physics). However, by temperament and inner muse, I am a photographer, and have been one for far longer than my PhD gives me any right to claim an ownership by physics. Photography became a life-long pursuit for me the instant my parents gave me a Polaroid camera for my 10th birthday. I have been studying the mysterious relationship between inner experiences and outer realities ever since.

My creative process is very simple. I strive to record the subtle, interconnected web of energy that makes up what we call the world. For me, beauty, which permeates everything around us, appears in its most sublime state when form, color, pattern and texture are all in harmony. In the same way as all “objects” in this world are fundamentally impermanent, and essentially arbitrary, partitions of an otherwise continuous, unfragmented whole, I view photography as an almost mystical process whereby this illusion of fragmentation is momentarily lifted and the underlying essence of the universe revealed. To “see” the whole, one must first learn to see “parts” as mere illusions.

In simplest terms, I take pictures of what calms my soul. There may be other, more descriptive or poetic words that may be used to define the “pattern” that connects my images, but the simplest meta-pattern is this: I take snapshots of moments in time and space in which a peace washes gently over me, and during which I sense a deep interconnectedness between my soul and the world. Not Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “Decisive Moment,” but rather a ... Sudden Stillness.




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