Tracey Saraceni
Since I first picked up a film camera I was hooked. My parents got used to saying “Would you please put that thing down” because my camera was always within arm’s reach. I carried it around more than any teddy bear I ever had. I discovered that I was always drawn to candid and black & white images, perhaps for their raw feel. I would sit and look through book after book of the great photographers and study what made them stand out from their peers. As I started to travel more, I became engulfed in landscape and architecture – the simplicity of lines, forms and shadows always capturing my eye – much to the chagrin of whomever I was traveling with, as I couldn’t simply walk by a building or formation without having to photograph it from every angle. Along came my first DSLR, computer software and image processing software. I did some editing at first with pumping up a color here or removing something from the scene there, and it left me feeling odd. I wasn’t God and had no right to create things that never really existed just to pass them off as a ‘perfect’ picture. I was a photography purist, and I still am today.