About
Douglas Ethridge Photography
People, Places, Stories
My first camera was a little Kodak Baby Brownie Special made of Bakelite. It got 12 pictures to a roll and the prints came back with deckle edges. My parents loved to take us on road trips, and I used my camera to help me tell stories to my friends about the places we went.
Not much has really changed. I still have the Baby Brownie. My other cameras have gotten a little fancier. The prints don’t have deckle edges any more. I still love road trips. And photography is still the way I like to tell stories.
The Decisive Moment
As I became more and more serious about photography, one of my first heroes was the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. His concept of the “decisive moment” spoke to me. At the time the photographs I was making were color abstracts, and so in reality the “moment” was pretty flexible. But I guess it was more the idea that once you pushed the button, you had made a decision. You had made a commitment to seeing what something was going to look like as a photograph.
I still live by this concept. Time and again, I am most happy with my images when I make fewer of them and make them more thoughtfully. When I am patient and decisive in my efforts.
The negative is the score, the print is the performance
While I’ve never considered myself a landscape photographer, there are few photographers whose print-making ethos I admire more than Ansel Adams. Here again I suppose it was his articulation of a key principle that resonated with me. By viewing the negative (or capture or whatever you want to call it) as raw material and not a definitive end point, we are both freed from any particular expectation and obligated to continue the thoughtful creative process.
Just as the performance of a piece of music changes with each occurrence and performer, why should we not continually explore new performances of our images through variations of materials and processes. I let the images drive my exploration of how to express the print and work with silver gelatin, silver gelatin lith, platinum/palladium, gum dichromate and digital printing methods.
I’d submit that there is no “best” interpretation of any image, only the best that you can do with each attempt. Especially in these times where we have a vast array of powerful digital tools plus more than a century’s worth of time-honored analog ones at our fingertips. As someone who cringes at doing anything the same way twice, I find this a wonderful time to be a print maker.