"Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be."

- Duane Michals

"It's not the photographer that makes the picture, but the person being photographed."

- Sebastio Salgado

"A picture is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know."

- Diane Arbus

"I don't know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I do know that the women are beautiful in the photographs."

- Garry Winogrand, introduction to Women are Beautiful, 1975

About

I have, for almost fifty years, been almost exclusively a people photographer. I like birds and trees and flowers and waterfalls and mountain ranges and sunsets and rainbows well enough, but have never been motivated to photograph them. People, though, are always fascinating.

I love doing street photography. I like nothing more than spending anonymous hours alone in public places with my camera, quiet and watching, looking for human beings being human beings and trying to capture moments that are briefly here and then gone forever, except as memorialized on my Ilford HP5 black-and-white film. I avoid interacting with people as much as possible so as not to miss any nice moments that won’t occur again.

Women in general, mothers and daughters specifically, and street photographs have been my three subject categories. Some of my photos in the first two categories have been posed but most have been candids, taken in such public places as street and ethnic festivals, theme parks, farmers markets, county and state fairs, art fairs, zoos, the not-so-mean city streets and other locales, mostly in Wisconsin and Illinois. I’ve endeavored to capture human emotions and relationships when I can. There’s never any shortage of that and, to me, it’s endlessly interesting.

A good photograph doesn’t have to provide answers, which are always elusive anyway. Raising questions is enough. 

-Marty Drapkin