Surreal Images On and Off the Street

Jazz and surrealism have played an important role in my outlook on life and what interests me as a photographer.

When I was a student at Oberlin College and The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, I began writing serious and humorous articles, poetry and fiction, some of which were performed with jazz background music. Later, when I was living in New York, I declaimed some of my poetry on Sunday nights at the Java & Jazz coffee house in lower Manhattan, accompanied by surreal sound effects that I had created and taped in a recording studio.

I have always had an interest in art and enjoyed my art history courses in college, which sharpened my understanding of line, color, texture, visual forces and symbolism. Some years ago, I cast about for a way to fulfill a desire to do something with my artistic impulse and decided upon photography. I purchased a Canon EOS 1 camera in 1990 and became a self-taught, New York-based photographer who marches to his own drummer. In recent years I have gone digital and have been using a Canon PowerShot SD 940, a Canon EOS Rebel SL 1 and a Nikon Coolpix P7700 as circumstances warrant.

My outlook and visual interests have been influenced by the works of Doctor Dolittle, Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel, Marcel Duchamp, S.J. Perelman, the Theatre of the Absurd and the 1920 German Expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. This brilliant silent movie is noted, among other things, for its radically slanting lines, which are a feature of many of my surreal photographs.

In my street and roadside photography, I work by serendipity, selectively looking for people and animal subjects that are offbeat and surprise, confound and challenge the viewer. I call my work in this collection Everyday Surrealism, which frequently has a humorous edge to the images. The samples of my work below also reflect a concern with how my photos are presented – their sequencing/clustering and the titles that I create for them.

I began my ongoing Surreal Images project one summer many years ago when I saw some cows in a meadow and leaped out of my car to capture a tableau of sunshine surrealism from a roadside vantage point using my Canon EOS 1 and Fuji 100 ASA film:

Years later, I was driving on a country road in upstate New York and saw several cows after dark that caught my attention. Armed with a small camera with flash, I captured them from the roadside, their eyes blazing:

A trio of images from the Caribbean follow. The first one reminds me of people doing selfies in New York:

A tangle of people and dogs at an intersection near where I live, with eerie shadows and slanting lines:

I was taking a taxi in the rain when it pulled up next to a car stopped at a light. I saw two female legs with toes up and no driver at the wheel, rolled down my taxi window and took a once-in-a-lifetime shot. Other legs follow.

Shoes have been in the news, and I found a sinister pair in an ominous place a few years ago: