HoboEye Art:
Joseph Holmes, Brooklyn, NY

Artist Statement: I was born in 1954 and raised in a tiny factory town in rural Pennsylvania where my father taught me how to develop film and make prints in our closet darkroom.

My photographs have hung in dozens of shows around the United States and Europe. My work appears in the survey "Photography Now: 100 Portfolios" and was displayed in the Berlin subway in summer 2006 for "Berlin Meets New York." I was one of four photographers featured in Nikon's national print campaign "Stunning Nikon" in 2005 and 2006, appearing in National Geographic, People, Popular Photography, and many others.

At various times I've been a Legal Aid lawyer, a prize-winning screenwriter, a magazine journalist, and a janitor. My short stories have appeared in the literary journals North Atlantic Review, The Pikeville Review, and Phantasmagoria. I make a cameo appearance in Gogol Bordello's "American Wedding" video.

I lived in various towns and cities in the East and Midwest before settling in Brooklyn in 1984 where I live with my wife and two children. I'm represented by the Jen Bekman Gallery in NYC and wallspace in Seattle. My photographs of New York City appear daily at joesnyc.com and manhattanusersguide.com.

My Workspace photographs are part of an ongoing project documenting a variety of workbenches, desks, and counters, through which I seek to reveal the worker obliquely through the space’s accumulation of notes, photos, cards, tools, souvenirs, and the many intimate details of these quasi-private spaces. A workspace can represent a tug of war between personal expression and comfort on the one hand and the unyielding demands of work on the other, and the long accumulation of the tokens of that struggle, over years or even decades, can be formally beautiful in a very human and touching way.

Because I document a space exactly as I find it, never arranged for the camera, the Workspace project is necessarily a spontaneous process. I can’t, for example, call ahead and explain what I’m after without inviting the destruction of what I hope to capture. I usually find workspaces by walking in off the street with my camera and tripod and simply asking (though “simply asking” doesn’t quite convey the complex dance of explanation, skepticism, persuasion, and fascination that goes back and forth). What I end up capturing, then, turns out to be the work that was interrupted to answer the door.

See more of the Workspace series >