Egypt, 2010
We were in Aswan, at the Temple of Philae, when I turned and he was standing there in that light. Some photographs are just gifts from the Universe.
I’m often asked, “What is your favorite thing to photograph?” “Naked women,” is sometimes my reply, because I’m a smart-ass and just can’t help myself. (Barbara keeps telling me a lot of people don’t get my sense of humor.) I usually follow up with a “real” answer, that I like travel oriented photography, but that’s really a non-answer, too, because travel photography is everything–landscapes, cityscapes, people, flowers, architecture, monuments, events, and on and on.
For me, making a photograph is less about the nominal subject, and more about how I can work with all the visual elements in the scene to get the strongest, cleanest design, to support whatever the story is. I started my career on a daily newspaper, where a staffer had to shoot everything–from breaking news to check presentations for the Newsroom, athletic meets/games and players for the Sports Department, and more lifestyle type assignments for the Women’s Section (and if that gender label bothers you, at least it was an improvement over the previous name, the Society pages). Editors were on deadlines, expecting photos they already had planned in their layouts, so one fundamental of the job was, you had to come back with a usable picture. Oh, also, it was going to be printed with an 80 line screen on paper not much better than toilet paper so don’t be clever; fine details don’t reproduce. Fifty-five years later I’m still discovering how much that first job influenced everything I’ve done since then.
Oddly, even though I started in journalism where almost every picture is about people in some way, I never think of myself as a “people” photographer, maybe because I see of them as simply another element in the scene, but when I go through the take from a trip I find lots of people, and striking faces.
To see a gallery of Egyptian Portraits, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index/G0000LwBdd2qMK.g