Great things never came from comfort zones…

I got my first camera for my 14th birthday, a Sony Alpha 55 that could shoot fourteen frames per second. At the time I thought speed and technology would make me a better photographer. After a year of chasing images, I grew bored and traded my camera for paintbrushes. In high school, a magazine told me abstraction was the natural evolution of art now that photography had perfected realism. I believed it.

In medical school I felt the pull of a creative life again. I earned a scholarship to spend a summer at the Berlin Art Institute and carried my brushes and paint across the ocean. In that studio, however, I felt contrived. Inspiration came only when I stepped outside. A friend who owned a film camera shop handed me a camera. I walked the streets of Berlin and captured everything I saw. Photography returned to me, not through speed or technology, but through patience, observation, and the slow mechanics of film.

I thought often of the Hudson River Valley painters I admired at the National Gallery of Art back in Washington, D.C. Their school was dedicated to exploring the drama of nature against the smallness of man. I found my home in that vision while on shoots. Landscapes appeared to me without too much asking, surreal and wild. The challenge was surrendering to them. I do not plan my shoots; I must find them. If the light and scene distract me enough, I stop and understand why.

STUDIOBrett lives in the gap of drama and distraction.