Free Association
Free Association is a zine series I started producing in 2012. This series of images is influenced by a course I took in college. Charles Harbutt, an incredible documentary photographer, taught this course called Instinct and Metaphor. He was one of the few great, true documentary photographers teaching. Which, at Parsons, a fashion and design school, was really hard to come by. When I started taking photographs, I started out making documentary work. That is what I wanted to be, a documentary photographer. I started shooting in the studio in college, which I loved, and really ironed out my technical skills with a 4x5 camera and a Polaroid back. After a few years, I was lucky enough to be one of Charlie’s students. In his class, I started shooting again with my 35mm film Pentax with a 50mm lens. Free and easy, I forgot how much I missed that camera! With each assignment that he gave, he wanted us to just shoot. Sure, planning a little bit - like making sure you had a few extra rolls of film, but nothing beyond that. He asked us to allow the camera to become an extension of ourselves, and to speak through its lens. Through his teachings I was able to understand my instinctive reflex, a millisecond decision to shoot an image. Then the next question came - well, why would I want to take that picture? We had to make the connection as to why instinctually shot that image, and what metaphor appeared in that image. We had to do this for every image we hung in critique. Ten years later, this is still an exercise I do regularly. Free Association, and each of its volumes are a direct result of this exercise. The story I compose through Free Association will be different than the story you compose. The metaphors I see will be different from what you see. That is the magic of photography. Each volume is printed in limited editions, numbered, signed and sold in our shop.
Volume IV
Volume III
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