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.  During the 1970s I began to explore color and shifted to recording the craft and architecture of the American Shakers.  Beginning in the early 1980s I became fascinated by the hidden designs in man-made and natural surfaces.  This fascination led to the decade-long project that yielded many of the images shown here.  Initially conceived simply as “rust,” the project expanded from detailed images of rusted metal captured from construction sites throughout Boston to include various other instances of distressed or altered metal and wooden surfaces wherever I could find them, including many railway sites.  This year I have included a series of new prints called B.A.T (after Oliver Nelson’s Blues and the Abstract Truth).  All images are produced from traditional 35 mm negatives or slides.