About
Early in life, my mother was a docent at the local museum. I’d spend hours hanging about, just staring at the ever-changing walls, absorbing at art in all forms of media. When our family got our first computer, a Mac, I immediately started integrating my love of computers and art, going so far as to attempt to create images pixel-by-pixel on the small 9-inch black and white screen, and going to the local university to pick up books on “graphics programming.” I moved on to publishing newsletters and zines, making logos for local bands and startup business, and other such miscellaneous activity. As high school drew to a close and college entered the picture, I picked up my first “real” film camera, a Canon Rebel, and a just-barely-usable flatbed scanner. I declared myself a Visual Arts major and worked the off hours for a marketing and graphic design center on campus.
However, film and processing weren’t the best of friends with my meager budget, and I found myself more frequently involved in the programming and engineering side of computing — which were, effectively, “infinite,” re-usable resources. Late freshman year, I changed majors to Computer Science, and graduated with that. Not until a few years in the workplace flew by did I realize how much I missed expressing my artistic side, and now had enough capitol to be able to invest in some decent gear. By now the game had changed: digital SLRs were nearing the quality of film SLRs. My next camera was the digital version of my old Rebel (and indeed, I still use the old camera strap on the new dSLR as acknowledgment), and these two vectors, that of technology and photography, continue to converge at ever-increasing paces.
I continually swing back and forth from deeply saturated, well-framed, “polished” photos, to the dirty, gritty, grainy, black-and-white underbelly of existence. I believe this stems from a lifelong interest in philosophy and martial arts, both of which are rife with polemics: introspection and expression, life and death, refined and coarse, beauty and utility, to name a few. Naturally, none of these can be separated from its sibling, and in some cases, they are one in the same.
-Barclay Osborn