"I don't know if I like it, but it's what I meant." - Ralph Vaughan-Williams, on his fourth symphony.

"Bruce takes excessive interest in personal art projects." - My first grade teacher, in my student file, 1960.

Perhaps my first grade teacher was just trying to warn the other teachers that they had a little lavender one amongst them. Thankfully the other teachers tolerated my interest, and a few even encouraged me in it. Drawing and painting were a constant preoccupation in grade school, a reflex whenever I had a pen or pencil in my hand. I still have one of my old three-ring binders, all covered with doodles and drawings.

Mom was supportive and gave me plenty of drawing tools. There were painters in her family, and so I later learned, in Dad's too. She loved her paint-by-numbers but her boy tended to draw outside the lines, so she gave me lots of blank paper and crayons and a folding table I could draw on. One summer while on vacation mom lent me her camera for an afternoon, and when we got the roll back from the developer everyone was pleased at how good the pictures were. So for my 7th birthday mom gave me my first camera, a little Kodak Brownie Fiesta.

That camera became my constant companion for every vacation and school field trip from then on. I always got compliments on the pictures I took, and the gadgetry of photography tweaked the budding techno geek in me. But it wasn't until my high school art teacher, Frank Moran, clued me in, that I became aware I could also use the camera as an expressive tool. A friend showed me how to develop my own film and I bought my first 35mm camera to give it a try. Seeing it Frank gave me an assignment that consisted only of a title, "Evidence of Man", and instructions to produce photographs based on whatever I made of it.

It set me off. Something deep down inside just clicked with that assignment. The imagery came out of me in torrents. Soon after I bought my first 35mm SLR, a Petri FT. and the following year I worked flipping burgers all summer long to be able to buy a professional grade camera and lens...my Canon F1. For the next decade and a half the F1 was my constant companion everywhere I went. I began to reconsider my future career...maybe I should become a professional photographer instead of a cartoonist. I was already my school newspaper cartoonist, now I became its photographer as well. I started submitting photos to the yearbook, and got a few small gigs with some local community newspapers.

And around then I fell in first love, and the hunger to create was joined deep in my heart by that aching hopeless longing so many gay folk of my generation know much too well. Perhaps it was only coincidence, perhaps not, but I noticed around that time my art photography was taking a darker, more estranged turn. My newspaper assignments, travel, and the wedding photography I had begun making a few bucks at were unaffected. Only the art photography, the stuff I did as a purely expressive exercise, began speaking, sure and certain, in that one odd and very dire voice.

They say that photography alone among the arts, is the easiest to master and the hardest to find your own voice in. When I was very young and first began to draw, I had an intuition about style...that it was more a matter of how the hand was wired to the brain than anything else...and I should concentrate on the basics and let my "style" be whatever it was going to be. I approached my photographic "style" the same way: just Never Mind...concentrate on the craft, the mechanics of it, and get that right, shoot what interests you, and whatever style that happens will be authentic. But what I saw was a style that I wasn't at all sure I liked. After high school I tried doing my first book of photography. Titled Shadows and Light, it was a collection of what I felt to be my best art photography then. By the time I finished with it I pretty much knew I was never going to be a happy calendar photographer. But for whatever the reason, it was me.

I know that probably sounds hard to figure. Why not just stop doing what you don't like and go do something you do like? But it isn't that easy. Why bother with the cameras at all, other than to record your vacation, or the happy times spent with family and friends? Why the hell make art in the first place? You do it, because something inside of you needs to get it out, and this is the way it wants to get out, or the only way you know how to get it out.

Well...also...yeah...the logical analytical side of me loves fooling around with gizmos, and cameras are lovely mechanical objects...works of art in their own right actually. So yes...there was always that side of it too. The techno geek and art geek are both strong in me. After high school I got a warehouse job at a large photography supply store that catered to a mostly professional clientele, and every day before the store opened I would get my hands into the camera display cases and play with the cameras for sale. There in my hands I could tell which designs made elegant sense, which brands were solid and likely to be very reliable, and which were thin shells of stamped metal and glass. You heard the solid click of the mechanism, felt it in your fingertips.

But the need at the heart of it all is very difficult to describe. When I'm out and about with my cameras one part of me is all logical thinking about light and exposure and focus and the general mechanics of photography. But the other part of me...I have no words for it. Ask me to describe how a symphony feels. Sight can strike the same emotional chords as sound. Light and music are not all that different in that regard. This is something the grand masters of painting have always known.

So with my camera I am hunter, wandering through a likely patch of ground where I judge the game is likely to be. I stroll around and around and around as if I were lost, not really thinking about anything in particular, eyes darting here and there, exploring, watching, waiting. Waiting for this nameless thing inside of me to alert. And then I go where it directs, raise the camera to my eye...and it's all emotion at this point...I have no words to describe it...none. I am feeling what I am seeing, and when I get the feeling right in the viewfinder, when what I see makes that nameless wordless thing inside of me satisfied...(is this what a muse is?)...I snap. Then I move around my subject...recompose...snap...adjust position...look...snap... Snap, snap snap. At some point it lets go of me and I wander off. Sometimes, when I hit it at just the right instant, it feels like a little electric current jumps from the shutter release through hand though my arm into my body.

If all this sounds a tad nuts I won't argue. If you think it pretentious I don't care. It is what it is with me. I never pose anything...not for the art photography...the purely expressive stuff. I deal in "found images", though I have sometimes yelled "DON'T MOVE!!!" But I don't pose anything. Random chance does it for me. The found images have a sense to them nothing I could pose or arrange ever would or could.

Life became more and more lonely in my 30s and 40s and I began to hate looking at what was coming out of me photographically. In the late 80's I stopped doing it altogether because I was sick of looking at it. I put my cameras away, stopped working on my photo catalog, and also my drawing pencils and brushes. I didn't want to have to deal with my feelings anymore. I dove into computer programming...the first microcomputers were just hitting the market...because it tweaked my techno geek side just as my cameras had. But also because it was a way of being creative that did not involve my feelings. There is perfect logical beauty to software algorithms. I could be creative, I could make things of beauty, and I didn't have to examine my innermost feelings doing it. I just didn't want to go there anymore...and I was afraid to.

The late 1980s were the worst period in my life, the 1990s a little better because by then I was making a decent living as a software engineer. Eventually I got a job at the Space Telescope Science Institute where they work on the Hubble Space Telescope...I thought I'd died and gone to Heaven...and one day in early 2000, while wandering the campus at Johns Hopkins I saw workers setting up some carnival rides for the student spring break fair...and something deep inside me reawakened, and I picked up my cameras once again.

I began drawing again too. I got a gig for a local gay community newspaper as a political cartoonist, and joined the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. I also began getting the occasional news photo gig again. I put up this website largely to showcase my photography and my cartoons, and to blog a bit about this and that. And looking back on those first tentative shots from that 2000 Hopkins student fairground, I could see nothing had changed. It was as if whatever it was inside of me had simply waited patiently for me to put my hands back on my cameras again, and start back up precisely where we had left off.

It is what it is. Yes, yes...and it was a carnival that woke it back up. You will notice looking through the images that somehow I keep being drawn back to boardwalks and carnivals. Also the backs of buildings and industrial structures. Certain themes keep popping up. I leave determining those to others. I have tried for ages to figure this part of me out and I can't.

Two collections here, The Shadows and Light Sessions and Sleep Talking God, represent the before and after break in my art photography. The others are collections of shots I think are good, but don't really belong in the art photography galleries. The Road Trip collection in particular contains shots I am really proud of, but not quite sure where they fit in my portfolio, other than they express my love of driving down roads I've never been down before, just to see what's there. The Life and Times collection is photography I either did for my newspapers or just to record the history I was living through for myself. Living in the suburbs of Washington D.C. throughout the Johnson/Nixon Vietnam years, and the early days of the gay rights movement, I had plenty of opportunity to observe history as it was happening. There is a collection of Home and Friends photographs that is there just for the love of home and friends.

These collections are not static. The Shadows and Light Sessions will grow a tad as I get more things from that period scanned in, but that is a finite amount of stuff. The rest will continue to grow until I have put the cameras down for the last time. Hence, the gallery numbering, as opposed to naming them. If you like what I do, check back from time to time as I will likely have more galleries up. If I can get some sort of commenting system going here so viewers can leave comments on particular images I will, but that might take some time...this website is a one man operation and a lot of it, like this page for instance, is hand rolled.

Bruce Garrett
Baltimore, Maryland. 2013