giraffe

One of my favorite photographers is Wendy Ewald, and one of my favorite photo books is Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories by Children of the of Appalachians. In the afterword Ben Lifson writes about the dreamy, beautiful photographs the young, inexperienced photographers made:

“They had time to notice things simply for the sake of it… Out of this kind of pleasure come photographs that are to the ambitious photographer what good common letters and journals are to the ambitious writer: easy natural productions that make one long to work without self-consciousness… they photographed as children look at things, as though for the first time, with a gaze neither dispassionate nor moved, neither rude nor ceremonious, neither magisterial nor naïve but simply curious and engaged. They seemed to have walked up to their subjects and to have stopped when they saw them clearly and whole.”


I made this photograph at the Cincinnati Zoo when I was six.