Images and words by Matthew Hall. Used with permission.
When I was young my grandfather subscribed me to National Geographic. I remember the vivid images and stories of foreign places and thinking how lucky these people were to be working in such a field. I also thought how easy it would be to have a job as one of those photographers, traveling the world with nothing more necessary than the ability to push a button. It was years later that I began looking at the artistic side of photography, beginning with Edward Weston. Staring at his photos of peppers my initial thought was ‘so what, it’s a pepper’. Then, I began to see the sculptural quality of the image, and the transformative power of photography was opened up to me.
I continued to explore the works of numerous photographers — Josef Sudek, Henri Cartier Bresson, Ralph Gibson, Ernst Haas, Aaron Siskind, and too many others to list, but always I was most drawn to those who emphasized the transformation of the world into something else.
