ABOUT ME
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The camera is the least important element in photography.” -Julius Shulman
My Family
Hi, I'm Ian! After moving around the country 8 times in 10 years while my partner, Caroline, and I finished graduate school, we landed in the charming little town of Northfield, MN. We are finally able to put down some roots and are loving our new home in the upper midwest! Our adorable Italian Greyhound mix, Pickles, however, is less than impressed with the winters here. All in all, it's a pretty picturesque life!
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My Background
I come from a family of avid photographers. My paternal grandfather rarely was without his camera and he honed his photography and film development skills over the years. While much of his work centered around his passion for preserving family memories, he was a masterful landscape photographer, and some of the photographs he took while traveling through Europe during in his service in World War II inspire me to this day. My father was equally passionate about photography and, after buying his first camera (a Nikon F) from his father, he worked to master various techniques of film photography and film development. Some of my favorite photographs are handheld show-shutter shots he took of IndyCars racing around the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course we used to visit when I was a child. While I had cameras as a child, I didn't develop a true interest in photography until I went off to college. I spent my first two years of college at Coastal Caroline in Myrtle Beach, SC, and it was there that I became captivated by the way light, color, and motion dance together around the ocean. After years of dabbling, I got my first neutral density filter and fell in love with the ability to thwart natural light, distort time, and manipulate motion in ways that truly captured the delicate choreography of that otherwise disjointed dance. Since then, my interest in photography has centered around capturing and revealing the hidden, unseen, or overlooked elements and patters in the would around us, described in more detail below.
My Work
I aspire to evoke curiosity and awe through my photography and to afford people opportunities to think about, engage with, and perceive their surroundings in novel ways. Through long-exposure photography, my goal is to capture natural movement in ways that reveal new textures, shapes, and colors, which can transform a landscape entirely. My black and white photography is used to accentuate, manipulate, or distort dimensions such as depth, shadow, texture, and contrast to reveal patterns that are otherwise overlooked. Contemporary photographic techniques, including intentional camera movement (ICM), multiple exposures (ME), and exposure blending, are used to reveal contextual elements that often go unnoticed and, when brought into focus, can alter perception or our sense of reality.