Henry Horenstein

I was a history student when I first took up photography. In my early pictures. I documented old-time musicians in Nashville, Tennessee and people who worked at thoroughbred racetracks in Lexington, Kentucky. I shot at state fairs in St. Paul, Minnesota and Lincoln, Nebraska and high school football games close to my hometown of Boston, in Natick, Massachusetts. Also, near home I made portraits of race car drivers at obscure rural tracks and club boxers going nowhere. And at night I went to taverns in so many places, from Bakersfield, California to Hollywood, Florida, photographing as I went. Sometime I worked on assignment and sometimes on vacation. But almost always I photographed for myself.

 By recording these disparate pieces of our culture, I thought I was somehow saving them for posterity. In my mind I was a historian with a camera, or perhaps a folklorist. There is a great tradition of this in photography which started even before Matthew Brady and others made their haunting pictures of the American Civil War. When I was beginning as a photographer, I looked carefully at the work of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Brassai, August Sander, Weegee, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, and so many other amazing documentary photographers. Looking back at their work we see an invaluable record of our past and I wanted to be part of this tradition.

 As far as I can tell, the pictures in HUMANS and CREATURES and have nothing to do with all of that. Ten years ago, for no discernible reason, I began photographing land and sea animals and published books called CREATURES, CANINE, and AQUATICS. As the work progressed, I moved closer and closer so I could see my subjects more intimately. This way of working felt very different than photographing people, places, and events as a documentary photographer; it was far more peaceful, relaxing, and introspective. And it required a lot more patience. Photographing the human body was simply a natural extension of this direction.

 In all these photographs my goal is very basic. I want to make fundamentally good pictures-well-crafted photographs that make you stop and look and maybe reflect. Beyond that, I have no grand design, no hidden or overt agenda. You can choose to see these pictures in any way you want, as graphic images, as metaphors, or even as documents. It really doesn't matter to me.
 I suppose this is really a very old-fashioned idea. Today's artists are meant to be conceptually more astute, heavily armed with complex ideas and carefully worked out justifications and philosophies. But I don't believe good artists have to be intellectuals or great thinkers. They don't even have to be especially smart-except, of course, about making their pictures or their artwork.

 As a longtime teacher, I always hope that what I say and do has some positive influence on my students, even if that influence isn't always obvious. I was blessed as a student to have many legendary photographers as my teachers: Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Minor White. To me, they were all artists whose work was far more interesting than anything they had to say about it. However, as a young documentary photographer, my teachers' photographs didn't interest me much. They were too reflective, too formal, too personal-and not enough of this world. But what my teachers did teach me was the most important lesson of all: to respect what I did and to take it seriously. Looking back I now realize that they also taught me a little about picture making.

 In HUMANS and CREATURES I look at timeless subjects, the human body and animals, and try to make photographs that are familiar and intimate but still a little different. For this I have borrowed what I could not only from my teachers, but also from Many Ray, Paul Outerbridge, Karl Blossfeldt, Irving Penn, and so many other great photographers who saw nothing wrong with form having a function. I used simple, traditional techniques, photographing outdoors and indoors with available light-either natural or existing room light. I used 35mm SLR cameras, and often very high-speed film, usually ISO 800-3200. For HUMANS, I hired models and photographed every part of them bit by bit from head to toe. Then I asked them to turn over and I did it again. For CREATURES, I shot in zoos and aquariums, not in the wild. Sometimes I was two or three feet away from my subjects but very often I was much closer-some inches away or even less. To get that close, I used macro lenses and often added supplementary close-up filters to compose even more tightly.

I used black-and-white film, colored sepia in printing, to give a timeless subject a timeless look and also because it abstracts the subject a bit. Seeing in monochrome possibly allows us to look at parts of the human body or animals in a different light. Finally, I chose traditional materials because they have been proven over time to be long lasting and stable-something any historian or documentary photographer might appreciate.

Henry Horenstein
 Boston, MA



HENRY HORENSTEIN
Henry Horenstein lives in Boston, MA and is professor of photography at Rhode Island School of Design. He is author of over 30 books, including many monographs (Humans, Creatures, Aquatics, Honky Tonk) and textbooks (Black & White Photography, Beyond Basic Photography, Color Photography). His newest book, Close Relations, will be published later this spring. His photographs have been exhibited internationally and are part of many important museum and private collections, including the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, Museum of Fine Art in  Houston, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and the International Museum of Photography.