HoboEye Art:
Brian Price, Dillon, MT

I am not a technical photographer. I use a Canon Rebel digital camera, and I limit my editing to the software that comes with the camera. So I trim and make adjustments in brightness, contrast, and saturation, and that’s it. I print on an HP printer that handles paper up to 13 by 19 inches. What is interesting to me is the work of observing, of seeing what’s there, of stilling my internal noise in order to more readily attend to external signs and events so as to try to make sense of them in images. To me, this is the dimension of photography that constitutes its craft.

I don’t go outside with lots of ideas about what I want to photograph. I choose a destination and then spend as much time as I can walking around, paying attention. I lived in the vertical, people-dense Boston environment for four years and so my subject matter was urban. Now I live in Dillon, Montana, a space that is rural, horizontal, and people-scarce. I’m still making the visual adjustment.

Putting my eyes first requires effort. I’ve spend all of my adult life in academia as a teacher and administrator. As such, my life has largely been composed of words, read and written. In my photography, I am, in a sense, trying to see through words, in the multiple meanings of that phrase.

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