my story
| "Stare. It's the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. DIE KNOWING SOMETHING. You're not here long. --Walker Evans 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. After graduating from high school, 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 pored over books of photographs. I tried to create images like my new heroes, artists like Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander. I failed miserably of course, but you couldn't tell me that at the time. 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; I even shot and designed 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 only a year or two, but I still was there eleven years later when the merger with Macy’s shut our doors forever. I remember pausing at the door for a moment to stare at the vast empty studio before flicking off the lights for the last time. Now, as Photography Program Director at Boston University Center for Digital Imaging Arts, I work alongside some of the top talent in the industry, including our Consulting Directors, filmmaker and National Geographic veteran Cary Wolinsky, fashion shooter Rob Van Petten, and my counterpart at our Washington, DC campus, digital artist, filmmaker and program director Chris Alvanas. Best of all, I get to 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 in the mid-1980's, I assisted for Eric Roth, a prominent commercial photographer 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 above is about what the photographers who've always inspired me the most 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 |
 |