Gary's profile

The first picture I ever took was with an Instamatic of my dog’s face; I was about 10. I loved the little black-and-white images I got back from the drugstore. I got a 35 mm camera as a birthday gift when I was a junior in college; the first picture I took with it was the outdoor hallway of my apartment complex at night. I didn’t think it would come out, but of course it did. I had no idea how. I finished college, took a few photography courses, and wound up in the full-time program at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC. I learned the basics of photography, about seeing, and how to think with a camera. I did street photography and photographed models (friends usually) in different locations; I tried putting those images together in narrative sequences and blocks of images. After graduating, I worked for a few years in various photography jobs then went to graduate school at Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore, MD. I studied with William Larson there, learned something about cultural theory and postmodern theory, and made a film that combined archival footage of the Kennedy assassination with a parallel narrative of my own devising. In the mid-1990s, I took a course in Photoshop; over the next couple of years I began compositing black-and-white and color images.

The images in the “Window Seat” series come from trips I have made across the United States in the last couple of years. I have made sure that I book a seat by a window so I can look out and take note of where we are in the flight. Opening the shade on the plane window to view the vast and foreign territories our plane is traversing is often surprising and almost unbelievable. Living in cities in the crowded eastern United States, it is often hard to understand there are places where few, if any, humans make their way. I bought a high-resolution digital camera some time ago and started to record what I was seeing.

It occurred to me after a short time, however, that there was a cost to this experience that was not overtly contained in the price of the ticket and baggage handling fees. As I sip mineral water and take pictures, the aircraft I am flying in is discharging carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The titles of the photographs come from this realization. I went to an online carbon calculator and determined how much CO2 it is costing for me alone to get to a particular point in the journey. These are crude estimates, and, while such understanding has not yet prevented me from flying, they are an unsettling reminder of how much toxicity I am responsible for to make one picture.

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