David Harris

I began taking photographs in 1969, using 35 mm still and 16mm motion picture to record student life in college.  This early work, confined to black and white imagery, laid the ground work for my approach to the medium, namely as a means for documentation.  For the past two years I have used the West Medford Open Studios as a chance to exhibit samples of images taken largely in the 1990s as part of my “rust” series. Initially conceived simply as “rust,” the project expanded from detailed images of rusted metal on construction sites throughout Boston to include various other instances of distressed or altered metal and wooden and stone surfaces wherever I saw them. This year I will show some of the earliest work of the series, as well as more recent images from Portugal (shown here).  While the work has shifted dramatically from the photojournalistic work with which I began, I still use the camera as a way of seeing, of recording the embedded but taken-for-granted beauty that surrounds us, both man-made and natural.  All images are produced from traditional 35 mm negatives or slides.