About...
 photo by James M. Burk, 2002 |
About Jeff
Burk During my years at the Kansas City Art Institute (1974-1979), the faculty tended to promote straight documentary photography. I took one semester at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was exposed to a more conceptual approach. By the time I went to graduate school at Indiana University (1982-1986), I think I was trying to find a way to mix the two methods. |
Before and after graduate school I worked in photo labs, mostly as a black and white printer. Currently, my job is Lab Manager at the College of DuPage, where also, schedule permitting, I teach advanced black and white printing, 4x5 camera and the Zone System. I have freelanced a few times, usually in a documentary capacity. Infrequently, my photographs get shown in venues outside of the gallery system.
View
a PDF file of my Resume.
About What I Photograph
Generally speaking, I am a documentary photographer: I take pictures
of the way things are, ie., how things look. What I hope elevates the
image above a casual blank stare are the choices I make in subject matter,
light and composition, and how these are rendered in the print. The
prints are toned to emphasize the historical property of the photographic
act - to take a picture necessarily transforms the present into the
past.
The majority of my landscape images are made during road trips to areas both familiar and not. One could say I am a collector of "American stuff" and my pictures often reflect a time when the by-products of our mobile culture were indigenous and not generic.
I don't take pictures of people very often. I go through phases when I make portraits of friends, sometimes spontaneously; other times formally. For a number of years I photographed strangers and acquaintances as they went about having fun at bars and parties, and eventually collecting them in a series called "The Pursuit of Happiness." But that sort of obtrusive photography does not go over well these days.
My influences are fairly obvious. In terms of landscape, I follow in the footsteps of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Nathan Lyons, and Henry Wessel. In photographing "candids" of people, I cite Mark Cohen, Larry Fink, and again, Friedlander. And I've found kindred spirits in some of the work of Richard Misrach, David Plowden, Michael Kenna, William Klein and Aaron Siskind. When I saw a book of Robert Rauschenberg's photograph's, I was surprised to see how similar my approach was to his. In painting, I think I have been influenced by Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series and a few of Hans Hoffman's canvases in intangible ways.
I feel that my photographic
abilities continue to progress and strengthen. There are many more places
to see, and many more roads to follow.
About this web site
This web site is meant to be a large retrospective of the kind of photographs
I make. What you see here is just a start. I intend to periodically
add or remove images as I get new ones scanned. I expect the gallery
groupings will change as I get more specific series completed.
Some information about how these images were made can be found on the Technical Page.
The site was designed and built from scratch (on a Mac) as I learned how to use Dreamweaver MX. I used a number of browsers to make sure it functions well. Please let me know if you encounter any problems.