106 Mike McGarvey by Steven Erra

I'm a long time member of the Seeing With Photography Collective, based in New York City, and am posting some of my individual images here at Flickr. Our group has people totally blind, visually impaired and "normally" sighted. I'm in the visually impaired-legally blind category, and still retain a little eyesight, but not much.

The images in this series are all light paintings made using a 4x5 inch view camera and opened shutter in a very dark room. The flashlight is used like a painter's brush to bring out shapes from the darkness.They span many years roughly from 1998 until around 2007, our group rarely uses the big view camera now, as Polaroid has discontinued production of their negative film. I miss it.

 

Mike was rapidly loosing his eyesight. He was a painter and very experienced commercial photographer. Mike hated our light paintings. And never took one himself, except as exacting scientific experiments, there was too much chance and loss of...control, for him to accept the work as serious. One morning I drew a marbleized design on some brown paper to use as a background, and he astonished me by complimenting my work, the sole one I ever got from years of being with him. He'd just hang out and complain about our work, never wanted to join. Although he'd sit around and direct you, tell you how stupid you were, and didn't know anything, he did enjoy posing a lot.

Please visit SWPC's own extensive pro site at Flickr,new images are added there quite often ,so you can keep up with our output...

www.flickr.com/photos/seeingwithphotography/

and main website...

www.seeingwithphotography.com/

and my own website too...

home.earthlink.net/~nicomaco/index.html

Done