Davis Barber, Photographer
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Fullerton | CA | USA | Posted: 5:42 PM on 09.12.09 |
->> One of the things I learned when I left my newspaper job way-back-when was that I was a pretty good newspaper photographer. I could shoot news, sports, features, portraits and long-term projects with a high level of competency and occasionally, maybe, a bit of greatness.
What I didn’t know how to be was a photographer. That is, someone that makes images for fun, to try new things or maybe even for be something you could call art. Having grown up in a newspaper family I knew news, and that was fine with me. I just used a camera to report it.
During the many years since I’ve learned much more about being a photographer and what it means to have a creative idea. Better yet, how to have a creative idea and then run with it.
One guy I’ve been fortunate enough to work with the past few years is the king of running with wild ideas. Jerry Burchfield is his name, and when I first met him he looked a bit like he had maybe partied a bit much the night before; an old-hippie kind of look. But his reputation had preceded our meeting, so I wondered to myself if this was really the guy that some folks had called “one of the most genius photographers to ever come out of Orange County.”
Over the next few years I learned why they adored him. He and a long time friend and business partner, Mark Chamberlain, once photographed every foot of Laguna Canyon Road between the ocean and the 5 freeway. That’s several miles. To hear Jerry explain it over-simplified it. He said it was, essentially, a wild hair up their butt.
But they also used it to help protest over-development in the region and the construction of a toll road that would eventually bisect the canyon.
Jerry coordinated another project at Cypress College where they placed photo paper on the pavement that wrapped around the entire campus. I think the exposure was “full sunlight until we pick it up.” More recently he created a book called Primal Images in which he created images in the Amazon by placing photo paper on the deck of a boat and taping plant materials directly on it. The natural sun, heat, humidity and organic nature of the leaves, etc., make beautiful images.
Even more recently he is a key member of the Legacy Project, the folks that took an abandoned hangar - one for airplanes - at the former El Toro Marine Base, and converted it into a giant pinhole camera. Their resultant image is, I believe, the world’s emulsion-based largest image. Jerry took special pride in creating a striking image in the digital age by using near-primitive technology.
Jerry Burchfield died yesterday after battling cancer the past few years. I don’t think there was a single photographer he met that wasn’t influenced by him one way or another. He was kind, generous and adventurous. He taught people by example how to push boundaries, how to succeed, and in my case, how to be a photographer.
Thanks Jerry. |
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