I work as a commercial photographer from Brooklyn, New York. I mostly photograph architecture and interiors for commercial and institutional real estate owners and developers. Born in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1957, I was schooled in photography in Rochester, NY and educated in photography in New Haven, Connecticut. A fourth-generation Brooklynite on my mother’s side, I have lived in the borough since 1983 and sometimes still miss Holyoke, MA.
Beginning in 1999, I briefly formalized my studies in art history, including photography and the graphic arts, at the City University of New York. I hope to live long enough in retirement to both resume the MPhil and finish a dissertation, certainly a pointless economic accomplishment at a time when — as photographer and curator John Szarkowski wisecracked — there are “PhDs in the history of photography on every street corner.” In recent years I have worked part-time as an instructor in the Department of Advertising Design and Graphic Arts at the New York City College of Technology, a part of CUNY in downtown Brooklyn. My occupations, while often delightful, are scarcely remarkable and certainly common.
A decade and a half ago the photographer and teacher Tod Papageorge — upon learning of my livelihood in commercial photography and perhaps wanting to be both helpful and assured that I never mistake such photographs for art — quipped a blunt comparison. The retrograde pictorial forms used by architectural photographers share a punch line with the Borscht Belt comic’s routine about prisoners hanging by their chained wrists in the old Soviet Gulag: I could save time and breath by numbering the tired, old jokes! A quarter century ago the printer and photographer Richard Benson — while loading film holders in my darkroom in the basement of Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building — saw on a wall Eastman Kodak’s poster “The Spectrum in the Graphic Arts.” Benson promptly called me “a techie.” Clear in my own mind about the withering intent of Benson’s deprecation despite his later asking for the poster (and knowing his birth year as 1943) I have always been faintly annoyed by the coarseness of my own and later generations’ common ambition to become an artist. But not earlier generations’, including Benson’s. It’s an issue of age: baby boomers and their successors are born too late, much too late, to claim any originality or courage when selecting photography as a life’s work for the making of art.
It is a tenet of high-modernist thinking that mechanical picture-making tools such as photography might be used to make art. This idea is now nearly a century old and, after the work of Walker Evans, well proven. After Rochester and New Haven and Brooklyn, and now an old farm in Litchfield County, CT, I can scarcely toss a rock without striking a photographer whose work is — in a not-at-all-secret opinion — that of an artist. Ten years ago Szarkowski said “Most of this work, I admit, seems to me quite tedious and a little sad.” Robert Frank’s stinging remarks from half a century ago are more apt than ever: “the air becomes infected with the ‘smell’ of photography.”
Walter Dufresne,
Brooklyn, NY,
27 February 2007
