Hershall W Spradley
My aim as a photographer is to create fine art photographs. A fine art photograph manifests something of the truth and beauty of the world in which we live and move and have our being. My photographs are, then, very much a personal expression.
A fine art photograph is a poem, a visual poem. A photographer pursues his work much as does a writer. As a photographer, I choose my subject and the camera and lenses to capture a subject the same way I, as writer, choose a subject and make decisions about point of view and how the subject will be developed. The image is composed like a rough draft. The photographer rewrites, or re-visions, or re-imagines, the image until what was first envisioned in the original capture is manifest.
One good photograph could, of course, be an accident, but I hope to do consistently good work so that my body of work would be thought something like the collected poems of Anne Bradstreet, or Emily Dickinson, or Robert Hayden. It is a part of our humanness to create art, and art is the rare combination of truth with beauty through which, like an open window, we become aware of another world.
Hershall Spradley
June 2013
