Moments in time and space
I was born in the middle of the baby boomer years when the amateur photography market exploded with smaller, easier to use and affordable cameras. I can’t remember ever not having a camera. My parents' subscriptions to "Life Magazine" and "National Geographic", which had issues filled with the work of amazing photographers who travelled the world, allowed me to see many places and people I had only heard or read about previously.
I got serious about photography in my mid-teens when I bought my first 35 mm, single lens reflex camera from the legendary Altman’s Camera store in Chicago, set up my first darkroom in the basement and paid for it by emptying my very small saving’s account and cashing in my coin collection of quarters, nickels and dimes at face value. I enrolled in a high school photography class and was fortunate to have a wonderful teacher named Joyce Neimanas who taught, encouraged and inspired me. I’ve been making pictures ever since with a variety of cameras for my own personal art and for commercial use. Early influences for my personal work were the Depression era and post WW 2 photojournalists who used a candid, in the moment approach, photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Henri-Cartier-Bresson, Eugene Smith, Robert Frank, Andreas Feininger, Margaret Bourke-White, and Robert Capa.
I dropped out of college at 19 and went to work for a couple of photo studios and a number of different commercial photographers before starting my own commercial photography business in the late 70’s. I focused on corporate identity, providing the photography for corporate annual reports, brochures and presentations. Basically I was “Have camera, Will travel.” I left that business in the late 1980’s and started a new career in the steel industry but I never stopped taking and making photographs.
Regarding my work, I’ll leave it to others to describe. My photographs are my words. I’ve sold my photos to private collectors over the years but never displayed them in a gallery or built a web site until now. I'm sharing my photos here for fun but they’re also for sale with limited editions of different sizes available of each.
If there’s a photo you’d like to own, please go to the "Contact" page and enter in your name, e-mail address, what photograph you're interested in, and what size you want, and I can tell you how many are left and what the price is. Photographs originally shot with film, negatives or transparencies, will be scanned to a very high resolution. All prints will be produced with archival paper and ink and will be signed and numbered. Available paper sizes are typically 11 x 14, 16 x 20, 20 x 24, 24 x 30, and 30 x 40 and the images will be centered on the paper with a minimum 1 inch border. Please note that some of the images, depending on the original media, may not be suitable for the larger sizes. Also, the quality of the images on this web site is not as good as the prints that you will receive.
Thank you for visiting.
ROY BERLIN
