Enjoy!
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Monday, November 21, 2011
Friday, November 18, 2011
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Friday, October 14, 2011
Monday, October 3, 2011
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Friday, August 12, 2011
Friday, May 20, 2011
Monday, May 16, 2011
Reinterpretation
view gallery: Reinterpretation
She was my first love. I found her on the pages of “Life Magazine” and hanging from the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts. She was small, rich in the colors of black and white. She was the representation of an artist’s reaction to life. She was the etchings of Rembrandt and Brueghel and the photographs of Weston and Smith. Her images were honest, brutal and beautiful. She inspired my first black and white photographs. It was love at first sight. It became my method of interpretation of life as I felt it.
Musicians often reinterpret their work. Visual artists tend to create with the sprit of one and done. While visual artists might work on a theme or style for a series we seldom go back to the single original and rework it.
Recently I have had occasion to revisit some recent photographs. A client had asked me to convert a couple images into black and white. I did not simply do an image>mode>grayscale in Photoshop but I went back to the original raw file and completely reworked it. It was like bumping into my first love all over again. Seeing these images anew in Black and White rekindled a passion that had been left behind.
Sincerely,
Zave Smith
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
34 Portraits
Showing Off
It is hard to find the time to sit down with art buyers and show off the new portfolio in person.
But it is such a blast when we do it. The reaction is just so positive.
Zave Smith
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Friday, February 11, 2011
It is almost an act of murder. In order to grow you often have to kill off the very things that have made you successful, in the first place.
At first I tried to understand and follow the marketplace. This was reasonably successful. But I was not after being reasonable. Besides, who was willing to pay for a cheaper imitation of the latest trend?
After ten years of some success at being a generic photographer, I started to become bored. I then started to put my craziness back into my work. I let go of the food and the products that had made my pay and started photographing shadows, kids, old people and even twenty-something cute girls. My only criterion was to make pictures that made me smile.
I used to get a lot of assignments that started with a layout. “Here, photographer, create a photograph that looks like this.” That is what I was paid for. Now I get assignments like, “Come down to Mardi Gras for a week and see what happens.” Or when Capital One called and ask me to spend some time photographing several small business clients of theirs in Dallas and in New York. No layouts, few directions, “Go see what’s there and bring us home something wonderful that captures the real life of our clients.”
I have learned that my best work, the work that makes my client’s smile is the work that happens when I let go. When I forget all the preconceived notions of what they want or what an “advertising” photograph should look like and I just react to what I see, I create photographs that sell.
Kill the concept and create a killer photograph.
Sincerely,
Zave Smith
Monday, January 17, 2011
Monday, January 3, 2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
