Who I Am and What You’ll Find Here (2025)
Intersections II, by Craig Boehman
Welcome to Dark Bias. This is the space where I bring together my photography, my thoughts on the medium, and the ongoing changes in how I approach image-making. I started out as a street photographer, chasing moments in public spaces and using people as my main subject matter. Street photography will always be a part of me, but over time I began to move beyond the idea of documenting people and situations. These days I identify more as a fine art photographer, which for me means working as an artist with a camera rather than as a recorder of daily life.
The shift wasn’t sudden. Years of shooting on the street taught me how to see, how to anticipate, and how to respond. That foundation remains. What has changed is my intention. I am not out to capture strangers and turn them into subjects. My focus has moved toward composition, mood, and the feeling of a place or a moment. Recognizable people are no longer at the center of my work. My photographs are less about observation and more about creating something that feels like it belongs to the world of art.
As of 2025, all of my current work is made with the iPhone 16 Pro. I chose this tool because it is always with me and because it challenges the old assumptions about what serious photography must look like. I have also shifted much of my editing to a tablet. This allows me to work anywhere and to bring a different rhythm into the editing process. Sometimes I still turn to my traditional setup with a desktop and heavier software when I need to composite or upscale. But most of the time, my workflow reflects how I live and move through the world today.
This blog is where I share more than just the final image. You will find essays on my methods, experiments with gear, thoughts on the art market, and reflections on photography as a practice. I will also use this space to show works in progress, small studies, and even rants about the state of photography. While my focus is fine art, I do not ignore the tools and technology that shape what I create. The camera and the editing process are part of the art, and I write about them here as openly as I do about the ideas behind my work.
Think of this blog as a living document. At the bottom of this post you will always find a section called “What’s New With Me” where I will update my current projects, exhibitions, or shifts in process. This way, even if you only land on this page once, you will get a clear picture of where I am and what I am working on.
Dark Bias is not a news site. It is not an endless feed of gear reviews or a clickbait list of photography hacks. It is personal, it is artistic, and it is mine. If you want to follow along with my work, subscribe to the mailing list or keep checking back. Everything starts here.
Why I Do This Thing Called Fine Art Photography Now
My beginnings in fine art photography came through experiments with time. I stretched the shutter until motion became a brushstroke. I dragged the camera across the scene, letting light tear through the frame. Intentional camera movement became my first language outside of straight street work. For years, street photography trained me to react quickly, to chase decisive moments, to be invisible. But ICM showed me something else: that a photograph could hold mood instead of fact, suggestion instead of detail. The long drag of light taught me that photography was not just about clarity, it could be about ambiguity, gesture, and energy. That realization cracked open the door to fine art photography.
From there, my interest has been less about documenting the world as it is, and more about reshaping it into how I feel it. The blur, the smear, the distortion: these are not accidents, they are choices. They are ways of insisting that the photograph is not just a record but an expression. And I have no intention of stopping there. I want to push further into what the physical photograph can become once it leaves the camera. Prints can be layered, transferred, scarred, painted, even broken apart and rebuilt. A photograph can be transformed into an object, not just a flat surface. That is the path I am walking now, because I do not see myself only as a photographer. I am a photographer stuck in a painter’s body, and my work is beginning to reflect that.
The hardest part of this shift has been breaking the shackles of the photographer’s mindset. Photography taught me to ask, What can I find there? That question kept me on the hunt, always chasing subjects, scenes, or faraway places. It tied the act of creation to circumstance. It convinced me that meaning waited somewhere out there, and my job was to stumble into it. Fine art photography demands a different question: What do I intend to create? That question puts the responsibility back on me. It doesn’t depend on airplanes or crowded boulevards. It means I can create here, in my own room, in my own city, on my own street. Travel and new places can still spark ideas, but the artist’s work cannot depend on them. An artist creates wherever they are.
This mental break is not easy. Years of practice as a street photographer built habits of precision, quickness, and reaction. But those same habits can be chains. They can keep you from seeing that art is not about chasing perfection. Martin Osner explains this difference in his talks on fine art photography. Photography often begins with exposure. Art begins with an idea. Photography prizes precision, crisp focus, smooth tones, natural color. Art embraces texture, exaggeration, and even fiction. Fine art photography is where those two worlds meet. It is photography led by intention. It’s work that expresses important ideas or feelings through the vision of the photographer as artist, regardless of the tool or technique. That shift in mindset, from camera operator to artist with a camera, is what defines fine art.
For me, this is the work ahead. This blog will change with it. While I will still step back into the streets now and then, the core of what I do will not be about what I happen to discover. It will be about what I mean to say. My focus is moving from chance to choice, from the hunt for subjects to the building of statements. This blog will no longer just follow me through the tulips of street photography. It will track how I transform daily life into something larger, how I push my work further into the realm of art.
This is why I do fine art photography. Because it lets me shape. Because it lets me speak. Because it allows me to create here and now, without waiting for the world to hand me something. It’s bout intention, not luck. It’s about expression, not just exposure. And it’s about treating photography not only as a way to record life, but as a way to make art that can stand, be touched, be remembered, and matter.
What’s New With Me
September 22, 2025:
Currently preparing for a three-week trip through London, Cornwall, and America. I leave in a few days, and Dark Bias will be on holiday with me. With any luck, the UK will hand me material strong enough to mark the start of a new chapter in my work.
