PHOTOGRAPHER'S STATEMENT

All photographs on this site, in limited edition, are available for purchase.                 Contact: gary@garywalkow.com

Represented by:

Millennium Images (reproduction rights)

William  Turner Gallery (Santa Monica)

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23 Very Short Stories

As a filmmaker I work at 24 frames per second. As a photographer, at 1/50th or 1/100th of a second.

I am interested in those moments when something is about to happen or something has just happened.  Images with implied and compressed narrative. Wings of time that spread before and after the instant the photograph was taken. 

I see each of these images as a very short story.  They are intended to work both individually and in sequence.  Consider it a short story collection.

My First Truck (36 Years Later)

30 years ago I sold my first truck to Rent-A-Wreck on Pico Blvd, which rents used cars, for $100.  Dave Schwartz, the proprieter, owns 200 cars.  My truck,a boxy unclassic 1971 Chevy pickup, became his favorite.  I had fixed it up with my Dad to drive from Texas to LA to go to film school.  The USC parking sticker is still on the front fender.  I find it remarkable that in a place as impermanent as LA,  I can photograph and take for a joy ride a car I never expected to see again.

When I was a boy a book of photographs by Ernest Haas made an indelible impression on me, a collection of abstract images observed in a macro view of nature.

For me the aged and distressed truck metal resonates with mortality, a micro-cosmos of abstract landscapes: planets in space, ferrous deserts, oceans.

Corner of the Universe (Fairfax & 3rd)

These are Cibachrome prints made from 645 transparencies that I shot of the tables and chairs at the Original Farmer’s Market, at Fairfax and 3rd in Los Angeles.  They were all shot in natural light.

This series was my first photography show, and a set of prints is now permanently installed on the upper patio of the Farmer’s Market.

I was drawn to the Technicolor glory of the tables, to the mystery and abstraction created by color and shadow, to the implied landscape created by framing, color, and light.

Airport Avenue Series

I am drawn to images which hover on the edge of abstraction.

I had an office at 3200 Airport Avenue, at the Santa Monica Airport.  When the building was being painted, translucent primer was sprayed on the windows, and then green paint was sprayed on the wooden window frames.  Formally these images are about a precognitive perceptual experience, like that of an infant, puzzling out forms, a twilight zone.  But they are also about the photograph, both as a two-dimensional plane and a looking through to a subject or meaning beyond.  For me this is a comment on the illusion that we are in a world, that we are seeing a world.

I rounded out the series with three sharp-edged images of the corrugated metal and fiberglass hangars just down the avenue.