Anthony Zingre

It's always been difficult to see myself for what I am and then regurgitate what I look to be to others. Our history, the personal one, ought best be kept private, but that's not the point here in this forum. It's about photography, sure. That being a rather simple edict, the act of what we do then, honestly, isn't about the nuts and bolts, the mechanical. It's about seeing around us and what our relationship and reaction to what we manage to fix our eyes on actually is. That said, the interaction we have can only be expressed technically, mechanically. It's a vicious cycle and a dumb one at that.
I left photography during the 2007- 08 recession when selling gear and a 8x10 Frankenstein's monster (fabricobbled out of old Ansco, Kodak and Century parts, complete with a handmade leather bag bellows with hair still on and a leopard print rounding it out) was a means of keeping a roof over my head for a few more months. Watching those tools go was enough for me to say never again.
I plumbed by day, wrote at night and got on with life without a camera for the first time in forty years. It still makes me wonder why. What was "art school"? What were those years under my professor, Sam Fentress? What were his under Emmet Gowin and his friendship with Ralph Eugene Meatyard? Was it Elliot Erwitt? Or was it just an odd pedigree of artists I'd found myself in line with half by luck and half by attraction to the work they were producing, including Erwitt. Who knows.
What is known, looking through this work of mine, seeing the influence for it, working my way back through the very first image shot on a Kodak Brownie, one only I remember making at age seven, is a consistent thread of abstraction, an abiding attraction to those I loved and a complete lack of focus I've since come to understand wasn't technical dereliction (I could pull a focus for that I had no connection to) but art crawling its way to the surface.
So... here I am, wanting to talk shop again, hopefully with those who know that this technical reality we suffer under is ultimately just the means to an end.
I look forward to hashing it out with those of you here but especially those of you here who realize what beauty there is in the imperfect.