Bob Dunn
Photographer / Based in Outback, Texas
I'm a retired journalist and computer/database geek living in the south-central Texas subtropics and pursuing various photographic and digital art projects. One of my abiding interests lies in the discovery...
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Focus:
Photographer, Journalist
Skills:
Photo Editing, Print Making, Web Design, Photojournalism, Web Development
About
I'm a retired journalist and computer/database geek living in the south-central Texas subtropics and pursuing various photographic and digital art projects.
One of my abiding interests lies in the discovery of the last visual vestiges of the age that preceded what I call the current American Corporate Culture.
My hunting grounds are the towns and villages of Texas and the surrounding South, where enterprising individuals once built their own homes and businesses and undertook their own home-grown advertising and marketing campaigns. Retail and other establishments were homemade, constructed of wood and metal worked by local craftsmen. In this era, no two structures were alike, contrasting to the pre-fab concrete and pole-barn "big-box" sameness spewed from coast to coast across American streets today.
Relics of this near-past age provide insight into the wit and talents and imagination of generations past, often with more depth and detail than official written accounts. This sort of photographic art, I believe, also contains elements of archeology and documentary history.
Some of the Homemade Culture of the past remains in good use and good repair; much more of it quietly crumbles into the woods and scrubby fields along the back roads. Yet even in this transformation I find hope. Nature - another of my abiding interests - triumphs over the rude and self-unaware ruination humans regularly wreak upon the planet. Given sufficient time, nature corrects these mistakes. Eventually, even after the worst of human catastrophes, balance is restored and always shall be so.
My work often incorporates the use of various digital processing techniques for altering the appearance of the final image, to better achieve the mood or the feel I happen to be seeking at any given time - or to transform the representational into the impressionistic, expressionistic or the abstract. I acknowledge that some still consider such processing - and even digital photography itself - controversial or at least inferior to the film camera coupled with expert darkroom technique. I maintain that there's no real argument, because we are talking about two different media. Is oil painting superior to metal sculpture? Is blue inferior to yellow? We each choose our preferred tools and methods and use them to filter reality as we see fit.
One of my abiding interests lies in the discovery of the last visual vestiges of the age that preceded what I call the current American Corporate Culture.
My hunting grounds are the towns and villages of Texas and the surrounding South, where enterprising individuals once built their own homes and businesses and undertook their own home-grown advertising and marketing campaigns. Retail and other establishments were homemade, constructed of wood and metal worked by local craftsmen. In this era, no two structures were alike, contrasting to the pre-fab concrete and pole-barn "big-box" sameness spewed from coast to coast across American streets today.
Relics of this near-past age provide insight into the wit and talents and imagination of generations past, often with more depth and detail than official written accounts. This sort of photographic art, I believe, also contains elements of archeology and documentary history.
Some of the Homemade Culture of the past remains in good use and good repair; much more of it quietly crumbles into the woods and scrubby fields along the back roads. Yet even in this transformation I find hope. Nature - another of my abiding interests - triumphs over the rude and self-unaware ruination humans regularly wreak upon the planet. Given sufficient time, nature corrects these mistakes. Eventually, even after the worst of human catastrophes, balance is restored and always shall be so.
My work often incorporates the use of various digital processing techniques for altering the appearance of the final image, to better achieve the mood or the feel I happen to be seeking at any given time - or to transform the representational into the impressionistic, expressionistic or the abstract. I acknowledge that some still consider such processing - and even digital photography itself - controversial or at least inferior to the film camera coupled with expert darkroom technique. I maintain that there's no real argument, because we are talking about two different media. Is oil painting superior to metal sculpture? Is blue inferior to yellow? We each choose our preferred tools and methods and use them to filter reality as we see fit.