I had left Kansas City at 4:am and driven to the One of a Kind show in Chicago. By 8:pm I had my artist’s booth set up and my photographs on display. Walking back to the hotel, I peeked through a construction fence and saw this scene. I had brought an Epson 3880 printer with me and by 1:am I had a photograph of the scene printed, matted, and framed. A few hours later, after the show had opened, I sold the photograph to an art collector.
This photograph reminds me of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells and The Steerage by Alfred Stieglitz. The novel by Wells and the photograph by Stieglitz show a society split between people of leisure and people of labor. I love working in black and white and while the cameras that I use to create these images excel at recording the surface of things — person, flower, building — I feel the very best photographs see past the surface and become metaphors that evoke images of things unseen; love, hope, loss, struggle, change. These images that see past the surface of the thing are the images I want to make and I felt that this photograph did that.
Lee Decker came home for the traditional Thanksgiving MST3K Marathon. Before he could get away, I managed to get a couple photographs of him with the old 8×10 camera using a paper negative instead of film.
I have a photograph in the Kansas City Artists Coalition Exhibition One Night Stand
Friday at 6 PM – 9 PM
Kansas City Artists Coalition
201 Wyandotte St, Kansas City, Missouri 64105
I have a photograph in the Kansas City Artists Coalition Exhibition One Night Stand Friday at 6 PM – 9 PM Kansas City Artists Coalition 201 Wyandotte St, Kansas City, Missouri 64105
Side by side windowlight portraits done with a Nikon D800 Digital camera and a Nikon F2 Film camera. I’ll be posting a number of these and I’m not going to say which is which. The film is Kodak Portra 160. The lens is a Nikon 105mm f/1.4 shot wide open. This isn’t meant to be rigorous comparison or even a film vs digital. It’s just something I did for fun.
Film and Digital Windowlight portraits by Kirk DeckerFilm and Digital Windowlight portraits by Kirk Decker
Getting prints ready for the Ridgeland Fine Arts Festival in Ridgeland Mississippi, April 1-2. From Available Darkness, a series of nightscapes taken in the Kansas City area.
Kansas City Nightscape by Kansas City photographer Kirk Decker
There is are particular curves whose angles and arcs nature constantly repeats. Beaks and wings of birds, flowers, faces, brains, and other parts of humans. Perhaps even our thoughts. Experienced painters know this curve and nail it. Inexperienced artists struggle with it, making flowers and faces that sound like out of tune pianos. It’s probably just a fibonacci curve – here’s a pair of curvy hawks.
A Red-Tail Hawk photographed by Kansas City Photographer Kirk Decker
