David Harris

Color photographic prints

Biography

I have been taking photographs for 50 years, beginning in college to document student life and protest. My work continued as a form of documentation focused on hidden beauty in rust and other degraded materials. All that changed with 9/11 which made it more difficult to access the sites I used to haunt. I began incorporating images from my travels and moved from film to digital several years ago. In recent years I have expanded to include flora and fauna (mostly bird life). Since retiring last year I have also begun to experiment with different ways of presenting my work and will be showing these images at WMOS this year. These include numerous diptychs and quadtychs of new and old works

Artist's Statement

I began taking photographs in 1969, using 35 mm still and 16mm motion picture to record student life in college. This early work, confined to black and white imagery, laid the groundwork for my approach to the medium, namely as a means for documentation. During the 1970s I began to explore color and shifted to recording the craft and architecture of the American Shakers. Beginning in the early 1980s I became fascinated by the hidden designs in man-made surfaces. This fascination led to an ongoing project, initially conceived simply as “rust -- detailed images of rusted metal captured from construction sites throughout Boston – which expanded to include various other instances of distressed or altered metal and wooden surfaces wherever I could find them. I have also always been fascinated by the natural world, as shown in recent images of trees and flowers. I have lately included images from travels and some more recent digital images. For a sampling of other images, visit my web site at insituimage.com.

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