David Lykes Keenan
Car Wash, from the project "Fair Witness"
2009
Series Statement: "It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness-" - Paul Strand, photographer.
My photographs, at least the ones that I show to people, almost always include people. Pictures of most "things", even lovely landscapes or seascapes, I find overwhelmingly boring. Rarely are these pictures of anything that I haven't seen before.
People pictures, on the other hand, are never the same. Things will always be, but people come and go, smile and frown, laugh and cry, love and hate, live and die. Things collect dust (I know, I have plenty) but people are life.
I watch people living their lives, doing mundane things that they, more often then not, are consciously unaware of. If I am on my game and have my camera ready then that otherwise lost moment is captured.
By now tens of thousands of such moments fill my negative archives and hard disks along with the occasional pictures of "things" that caught the fancy of my shutter finger. A very select few escape the archive and appear on my website or become a candidate for some other public viewing.
These pictures of particular humor, irony, melancholy, of startling incongruity, of humanity came from within.
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