about me
| I stared at a picture on a record album, in 1974, and in that moment I knew I wanted to be a photographer. I was 17, and it became my sole mission in life to teach myself how to use a camera. I pored over books of photographs. I imagined what it would be like to be Robert Frank, Duane Michals or Lee Friedlander. I got a job driving a subway train beneath the streets of Philadelphia at night and spent my days on those same streets making pictures. I was learning. Eventually, people noticed. In 1981 I moved away from my childhood home in southern New Jersey to Newport, Rhode Island, where I shot weddings and portraits and took some night classes in photography and graphic design at RISD. 5 years later, I ventured a little further north to Boston and began assisting some very impressive commercial and advertising photographers, each of whom helped me learn a much different aspect of the medium. It wasn’t long before I was shooting for my own clients; Charrette, ColorAge, Fidelity Investments, Graphique de France, Lotus, Harvard Health, and even three CD packages for EMI recording artist Al Stewart, whose album cover had inspired me years earlier. In 1995, seeing the digital handwriting on the wall, I took a staff job at Filenes’ advertising studio in Boston to learn the new technology. I planned to stay there for only a year or two, but there I still was in 2006 when the merger with Macy’s shut our doors forever. I was the one who turned off the studio lights for the last time. Now, as Associate Program Director at Boston University Center for Digital Imaging Arts, I teach people whose passion and enthusiasm for picture-making reminds me so much of my own, and I learn something from them every day. Not long after I arrived in Boston, I assisted for a prominent commercial photographer, Eric Roth, who seemed to like some of the black and white work I was doing at the time. He said to me one day “you’re like Walker Evans with wit.” I liked that, since I had always admired the great FSA documentarian’s work. I think Evan‘s quote on the right is about what photographers who do their work well do best. I honestly can’t tell you if I know anything yet, but I’ve been staring for a long time, and I’m still learning. --Randall Armor February, 2010 |
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