I got my first camera, a Kodak 127 Brownie Starmite, when I was 12. I recall wanting to capture the people and places I experienced so I could hold onto those memories, those faces that I knew even then would one day be gone. I hoped to remember always what it was like to be in a particular place at a particular moment. Thinking about the history of photography, this has always been one of its greatest appeals: to preserve our past and the people we loved.

Sometimes, the pictures “didn’t turn out.” Although I was disappointed initially, the more I looked at them, the more I realized that the “flaws” sometimes created images that I liked more. They more evocatively captured my experience of the people, places, and events I was trying to record, and they expressed something deeper and more resonant. I began to experiment - turning and moving the camera while the shutter was open, overexposing the light source behind my subject, underexposing the whole scene so only one element was visible in its pool of light – things that are all now part of my standard tool bag. The imperfections are often the compass that points the way to the path of truer expression.

As with most Western modernists, all of this references the influence of Japanese art, especially the concepts of wabi sabi (the appreciation of the beauty of the impermanent, imperfect, and incomplete), and ma (emptiness, the space between things, often referred to as negative space in Western art). Working with those concepts, I try to express my feelings through photography. For the purpose of this website at least, my observations fall into three main areas.

1. The Natural World: Earth, water, sky.
The physical world that surrounds us, nurtures us, and will eventually own us. These are the things we can touch and smell. The wind and rain, healing or destructive. The land, fertile or barren. The sky above us, both the thin layer swaddling the Earth, like the last layer of the onion - the world where clouds and rainbows live, and the infinite darkness beyond - the realm of sun and moon and stars. All these things are imbued with the life force, what the Japanese call the "ki" energy ("qi" in Chinese).

2. The Human World: Street Photography and New Topographics.
The stories of our struggles, our successes, our failures - sometimes told in our faces and our actions, sometimes in the environment we create for ourselves, sometimes in the things we build and then leave behind when we are gone.

3. My Internal World: Abstract, Minimal, Surreal, Impressionist.
People ask, “what’s that a picture of?” It seems that once someone can place a name, a label, on the subject of the photo, then they don’t need to think about that image any longer, as if they are trying to avoid looking into themselves for the true meaning of it, or to confront the more difficult and interesting question: “What feeling does that image evoke in you?”

In expressing my internal world, I seek to convey an experience that cannot be named or labeled, because it is not the person or place or object in front of the lens that is important, but the thoughts, memories and feelings the resultant image will draw out of the viewer. These are the images that will make us turn our vision inward and examine ourselves, which is the way to the greater truth. In this way, I hope to learn what’s inside me, and by so doing to learn sometimes, perhaps, what’s in all of us.

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This website and all photographs herein are copyrighted.
Joseph L. Akerman, 2010 - 2023.
All Rights Reserved.