Website: davidcorlissphotography.com

I have been asked for an artist's statement several times in recent years, but have never gotten to the point of putting fingers to keyboard. The question that has given me writer's block is, when did I become a photographer? That may seem like a simple question, but I have a day job and have practiced photography as an avocation. Even though I have sold images on and off since 1967, I am not a "professional" photographer in the usual sense of the phrase. This means that the question is not only one of when I became a photographer; it is also one about what a photographer is.

Did I become a photographer when, as a boy in Vermont, I tried my hand at nature photography by taking pictures of sparrows on telephone wires with a small, fixed-focus plastic camera I won for selling newspapers? I don't think so. All that earned me was good-natured ribbing. The desire was there, but those childhood attempts only put becoming a photographer on hold for many years.

High school and college were real dry spells with just a few snapshots to show for that entire period. Perhaps the real milestone occurred when, at the urging of a friend, I acquired the state-of-the-art Canon FTQL in 1967 and went into business with that friend. Corliss & Friedman occupied rented space for a darkroom in downtown Boston and actually had a few paying clients. It was not our intent to build a business, however. We were just trying to support our hobby because we both had day, and night, jobs as students in Optometry school. I was doing some of the right things, but not yet a photographer in any sense that made me comfortable calling myself one.

Fast forward from the late '60s, through graduate school in the '70s, and all through my long career as an academic in Birmingham, AL. I created boxes of slides, B&W prints, and color prints, mostly of family, with some odd images thrown in here and there. It turned out that among all those odd images were treasures that I discovered only when digital scanning, Photoshop, and really good digital printing became accessible. Many of them ended up in my first gallery show in January of 2005. Surely I must have considered myself a photographer at that point. The show was a success and a real high, but that is not when I became a photographer. I was, however, growing into the role as I reflected on what I had accumulated, created new images, and continued to build a portfolio.

All that led to another gallery show in November of 2007. It was not, however, that show either that finally revealed what a photographer should be and convinced me that I had a right to call myself one. The answer came months later when several people, quite independently, told me about seeing things around them in new light and saying to themselves, "That's a Dave Corliss photograph." What a wonderful thing to have happen. They saw the world in a slightly different way and credited having seen my work for that change in their perception. They were seeing by "mentally photographing" as Minor White put it. If I may be so bold as to paraphrase Dorothea Lange, I have come to the conclusion that “a [photographer] is an instrument that teaches people to see the world without a camera." I am one of them.