HOW A PSYCHOANALYST BECAME A PHOTOGRAPHER:

The Landscapes of the Inner & Outer Worlds


My profession is psychoanalysis, which is the most humanistic of all the medical specialties.  It involves intensive work with individuals over years.  It allows one to know people, their histories, their feelings, their wishes, and their hopes and fears in a way that no other endeavor can match. That experience has informed my view of the world, both the outer, everyday world and the inner world, the landscapes of the mind.  It could not help but influence my art, my photography.  


As with most photographers, I started with family pictures and travel shots. I graduated from those to flowers and leaves. Eventually, after my time as the Erik Erikson Scholar at the Austen Riggs Center, I became more serious about trying to record an atmosphere or feeling in my landscapes.
 
I love landscapes because the challenge to the photographer, as with any artist, is to distill the essence of a scene so that the image has the focus, depth, meaning, esthetics, and guiding intelligence that are essential in any creative art.

    

As my photography was developing, I was also becoming more experienced and, hopefully, more artful in psychoanalysis. In fact, I had always considered the practice of psychoanalysis as an art, which explores the terrains of the unconscious as the inner landscapes of the mind. Since that terrain is reported verbally, psychoanalysis can be considered an art form closely linked to poetry and, in fact, the images of the unconscious in dreams and fantasies utilize devices such as metaphor, simile, substitution, and symbolism also found in poetry. If the art of the unconscious is closely related to poetry and, like poetry, tries to convey images, moods, and feelings, the question become how to translate those poetic into visual images through photography.

My effort at present is twofold. On the one hand, to find beauty, symmetry, meaning in the natural and man made landscapes of the outer world and, on the other, to try to express the poetry of our mind's inner landscape. I have both inner and outer landscapes on this website, ones that I think best convey meaning, beauty (sometimes horrible beauty), and the potential of the natural and the psychological worlds. Lately, I have begun to do more with portraits and with nude studies and those galleries are also on this website.

Many images on this website are available as fine art prints in limited series of 25 prints. The sizes of the images can be adjusted to meet most needs because most of the files are quite large. Some images are available for licensing.  Some images are not available at all and in that case it is stated in the introduction to the website gallery.  


My images that are on display in galleries are very expensive because the cost of the mounting and framing and UV resistant glass is included in the price. It is more economical to purchase a print for about half as much and mount and frame it the way you like. I do my own printing, on fine art or high quality photographic paper, which gives lovely, rich colors and tones.  However, I select the paper that will best render the image. The size of the image, the paper for printing, and whether in color or black and white would always be discussed in advance of the final printing. Contact me through this site to begin that discussion.


I do not sell directly from the website because, although I hope the photographs on the site are appealing, they are in fact low resolution JPEGs that do not really do justice to the high resolution images from which they are derived.


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I have to add a sad footnote. Because of what sometimes seems like rampant piracy of images from the net, I have had to reduce the file size of images that I post. In that way, if someone downloads them for their own use or even claims that the image originated with them, they get an image that cannot be enlarged very far before it pixilates. Also, all my images have copyright information in the metadata embedded in the file so they can be identified. As I said, this is all very sad but reflects certain unfortunate aspects of the world we live in. Please hope along with me that things get better. In the meanwhile, I hope you enjoy the website and thoughtful photographic images.