Artist Statement

For more than 30 years, I've been making photographs. During that time, I've documented a changing New York, focusing on Times Square and Broadway. I've worked in the American West, mostly in Utah. I've photographed Venice and Scotland. Recently, I turned to Eastern Long Island, concentrating on the places where sea and land meet. I'm now exploring both New York's Hudson River Valley and France.


I work in large and medium formats exclusively. For 10 years, I've used a 6x17 panoramic camera, a format that, for me, most closely approximates the way people see. The digital revolution has changed the ways I work, however. I've been scanning older images, using a high-resolution imacom scanner, printing the archived images digitally with Epson Ultrachrome ink on photo rag paper. Now, because of its quality and ease of use, the new Hasselblad H3D-39 is becoming my most important camera.


As I work, I'm dazzled by the beauty I see, by the intensity and quality of light, by color, and by the world's evanescence. Indeed, as I look over my work, I realize that I'm trying to stop time and capture a small part of the world before it disappears or is completely transformed. Most of the New York images, for example, now serve as records of places that no longer exist. My images document the subtle--and not-so-subtle--ways that people make their mark on the natural world.


Some lines from one of Robert Browning's dramatic monologues capture what I'm trying to do. In "Fra Lippo Lippi," the painter-monk broods on his relationship with the visual world. That world is neither bad nor meaningless, he says. Instead, it "...means intensely, and means good: To find its meaning is my meat and drink."



A Note About Prints:

Panoramic prints are available in editions of five, plus three artist's proofs. Each image measures 17 inches high by 52.5 inches wide.

Other prints are also available in editions of five, plus three artist's proofs. HD3 images and 4x5 images measure 30 inches high by 40 inches wide. Hasselblad 2 1/4 square images measure 30x30 inches square.

Biography

Carl

As a child, I waited eagerly each week for the latest edition of "Life" Magazine. When it appeared in our mailbox, I grabbed it and devoured the photographs. For a small child in Salt Lake City during the early 1940s, "Life" opened doors on the big world. I trace my life-long obsession with photography to the photo essays that filled its pages. Despite this early love of photography, I only began making pictures seriously in my 40s. In the meantime, I’ve followed several careers, first as a professor of English at Columbia University, where I earned a Ph.D. Then, after a transition to the corporate world, I worked at Deloitte & Touche, serving as director of communications, global creative director, and senior writer. I retired in 2006. Now, for the first time in my life, I can make pictures full time.

My work is in corporate and private collections and in the collections of both Columbia and New York universities.

Shows include:

  • “Color as Subject,” 55 Mercer Street Gallery, New York, NY—1993
  • “Gentle Landscapes,” Bagley Home, Sag Harbor, NY—1997
  • “Venice Observed,” Caffé Bondi, New York, NY—1997
  • “Eating and Drinking,” 95 School Street, Bridgehampton, NY—1998
  • “Eating and Drinking,” Caffé Bondi, New York, NY—1998
  • “Where Sea and Land Meet,” Caffé Bondi, New York, NY—2001
  • “Big Panoramic Landscapes,” Thos. Moser, New York, NY-2001
  • "Utah Images," King's English, Salt Lake City, Utah-2005