Down by the Sea
DOWN BY THE SEA will be available for sale at the March 18 launch at Drifters Cafe & Bar in Bandra. Join me there at 12 pm for fantastic beer (I dig their IPA) and food. And support my launch by taking home a limited edition print!
I'm essentially a self-taught photographer who fell in love with street photography after living in India. I didn't know that street photography was a thing when I studied biomedical photography back in the film days, a career that never took off because of the sheer soul-killing aspect of it. At the time, I thought I could only make money as a photographer if I photographed models and fashion, subjects I had only a slight passion for and absolutely no background in. Such was my ignorance of photography. So when I'm asked these days which photographers I'm inspired by, I have no answer because I began shooting street photography without references. I was my only guide. Later, I studied photography more carefully and I can throw out names at you of photographers I like -- but none of them have informed my photography in the slightest. If I were to namedrop from the art world, there are only two that stood out for me in my early days: Egon Schiele and Marc Chagall. But this story is for another day.
I can only tell you what I look for in my street photography and what it is I'm after for my fine art photography, which is largely sourced, at least for now, from my street photography. The Aksa Collection is important to me because it is the marriage of street photography and a photographic technique known as ICM. And it was at Aksa Beach that my exploration of ICM lead me to don the artist's hat and enter the world of art. Once again, I'm in unknown territory. But at least I have a life of former passions from which I draw inspiration. And I have a good idea of where ICM sits if it were to be permanently hash-tagged by a recognized art movement: abstract impressionism. Other photographers may disagree with this but I see more who make reference to impressionism than not. The important point is that ICM captures scenes in the Impressionist style by default. That's because that's what you get when you use a slow shutter speed on a camera. I'm nearly comfortable saying that ICM could fall into the Expressionist camp as well but this would require an act of intentional photo editing on the photographer's part. As I gaze into my crystal ball I already know what the future holds for me in this regard.
Down by the Sea is an ode to the craft and to location. It's also the name of a cool Men at Work song that appeals to me more now than it did all those years ago when it played on 1980s stereo systems.
Sign up for my newsletter for pre-ordering on March 14 - 18. A 20% discount is available as well for those who attend the launch.
https://craigboehman.com/blog/february-9-press-release-the-aksa-collection-release-announcement
