The Photograph
The Whole Story
My wife and creative partner, Layne, and I were discovering the Botanical Gardens at the University of North Carolina Asheville for the first time. It is spring and the flora around here is breathtaking and changes with each passing week. There are creeks, streams, rivers and waterfalls all over the place! We were crossing a footbridge over a pretty wide stream. When I looked over the side of the bridge and saw my shadow in the water, I called Layne to come see. While we were standing there I had my iPhone in hand and captured this image using Hipstamatic with Lucifer VI lens and BlacKeys B+W film. It just seemed to hold so much in such a plain, simple black and white image.
We celebrated our 33rd wedding anniversary a couple of weeks prior. All the years and water under the bridge has only served to deepen our love and respect for one another.
The Photographer
Paul Cutright is a fine art photographer and visual artist living in Asheville, NC. He worked with traditional and alternative film methods before taking up digital work early on. He now works exclusively with digital media and has been strongly seduced by the rapidly emerging movement of mobile photography in general and iPhoneography in particular. Paul now shoots almost exclusively with his iPhone 4S.
Paul received a BFA in Fine Art Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1973. His work has been published in books, magazines and exhibited in galleries.
Paul says, “My work is meant to present the familiar in a slightly (or not so slightly) unfamiliar way. An intention of my work is to challenge the viewer’s assumptions about what is real, beautiful and valuable.
I want to touch that place in the viewer that knows, in their heart of hearts, that the world is not quite exactly as it seems. My desire is to produce images that evoke feelings of mystery, wonder and surprised recognition that open the possibility, if even for a moment, that our existence is subject, much more than we realize, to the power of our Spirit and inspired imagination.
I believe that beauty, whatever that might be for you, is as essential for nurturing the human spirit as healthy food is to the physical body.”
Find Paul: Instagram / Flickr / Tumblr / EyeEm / Website