My interest in taking pictures probably started in Hawaii when I was ten and my father, whose hobby was photography, got me a Kodak box camera. Other enthusiasms intervened until, at loose ends in Seattle in 1971, I acquired a Nikon rangefinder in a pawnshop and started looking around.
I worked in black and white and was especially influenced by the work of Robert Frank and Walker Evans. There came a point when, at a museum photo show, I asked the fatal question: why don’t my drugstore prints look like what is on the walls? I built the first of many darkrooms and, with the aid of books (especially Ansel Adams’ Basic Photographyseries) I blundered ahead till I took an invaluable class in advanced black and white printing. For the first time my prints started to resemble what I’d seen.
Since then, I’ve been in group shows in Seattle, Eugene, Coos Bay, Newport and had some photos published in books and magazines as well as 2 one-person shows at the Newport VAC. My recent work has been primarily influenced by my long-term interest in movies and painting. The latest sequence, Metal Landscapes, is related to the large panoramic paintings of James Rosenquist. A more extensive sample of my work can be found on my Flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lihue70/.