My photographic work began in earnest in 1973 with the acquisition of an Olympus Penn 35 SPn rangefinder and, a little later, a Minolta XE-7 SLR.
From the start, I was attracted to the unnoticed and ephemeral in the environment such as construction barricades, signs, billboards, a wrapped building…which quickly extended to other parts of the background environment…the view of the road, undistinguished architecture…
I want to see what we don’t look at.
In other arts, I admire the work of the sculptor John Chamberlain. Although his medium was 3-dimensional metal, I see analogies between my photographs and his work. In his sculptures, Chamberlain retrieved and transformed found objects. Where the original leaves off and the artist’s hand begins may not be evident.
In photography, I would like to think my work has an affinity with William Eggleston and Bernd and Hilla Becher. These artists also celebrated the ordinary and the unnoticed. They are just a little older than I am, and they were doing their famed work during the first decades of my own photographic enterprise.
I have collected and curated my photography for 50 years. In recent years, working mainly with Adobe Lightroom, I have been able to interpret and experiment with both my earlier film images and recent digital work. I continue to avidly take new photographs and work on refining my images, always returning to the insights that have motivated my photographic work for over 50 years.
Steve Lewent
