Stephen Cysewski

The projects I have chosen to share reflects the scope of what I like to photograph. The sequences are usually as I experienced them. The projects can be viewed as individual photographs or as sequences. My intent is to share how I experience what I see.

I create photographs because I enjoy it. I attach myself to the world through photographs. I started taking photographs when I was a VISTA volunteer in Shaktoolik Alaska in 1967. I have continued to take photographs, with a few gaps because of family and career, since then.

I love to immerse myself in situations that I respond to, I take photographs of what I respond to. My purpose is to show things the way they are, or really to show things the way that I see them. I want to share the diversity of my responses, humor, awe, beauty, disgust, irony, joy, and even boredom. I want to respond to a situation and not impose myself into it. On my web sites I show my photographs as a series of images, as they would be experienced by location and in some cases by time. I am not a conceptual photographer, I follow a more traditional path of responding to a situation with my feelings, values, and personality. I am interested in the ordinary the every day, and the mundane. It is the small ordinary details that resurrect memories.

I grow through the process of photography, the more I see the more I see! Photography is a cyclical process that leads to deeper insight and more appreciation of the world I experience. When I find a situation that excites me I go back again and again to experience it from different perspectives.

I have three broad themes that I consistently photograph:
1. Buildings and structures that reveal peoples personality, eccentricy, history and beauty
2. People, their personality, and their relationships in public places
3. Natural form, line and juxtaposition