TITLE: R U looking at me?

Close-up self-portrait - experimenting with side lights

AUTHOR: Gerard Blair (United States)

Gerard Blair was raised in the North of England and has lived in the South, in Scotland, Israel, Japan and now in the United States. Professionally, he is a Microchip designer and is pleased to note that in a summer job in 1986 he wrote the first drafts for a funding proposal for his Professor at Edinburgh University to start early research into CMOS digital sensors – although this history does not actually help him take better photographs.
Gerard’s first attempts at photography started in 1998 with a basement darkroom all in black and white film. Since 2000 he has moved into digital photography but has retained a love of contrast. His main outlet has been the Great Allentown Fair – an annual event including livestock and photography where he normally wins a first on one of the categories and has twice won best-in-show. Moo! We all have to start somewhere. One consequence of this focus has been a preponderance of portraits in his portfolio … of sheep and goats and fowl and such; thankfully, several vacations have broadened his range of subjects. Now, semi-retired, he is able to devote time to explore and study both the history of painting, and the creation of his own art using the camera.
His goal in photography is to discover ineffable joys.
Humor has been described as the unexpected collision of two plains of perception: the “twist comes” when ones view of the story changes abruptly where those two plains intersect; so too can joy be found in an image. It comes when a pattern, in line or color, jumps from the noise. It comes from photographing a sheep and discovering a Vermeer portrait or a Jan Steen scoundrel. It comes from complexity or simplicity, chaos or order, sometimes in a sideways glance, sometimes in digital-processing, but when it comes, it holds you for a moment - and in that moment you see the image differently.
This is what he seeks in his art: to capture images that hold beauty, and that bring pleasure which otherwise might have passed unobserved.