"My aspirations have remained the same: to document the contemporary cultural landscape and to produce a decent photograph - a photograph that acknowledges the medium's allegiance to reality and that preserves for myself and others a unique and honest sense of the subject."
"The environmental details have been kept to a minimum. The subjects have the frame to themselves and do not compete with context for attention. This provides for a simpler, blunter, more intense encounter with character. It is character that animates the image."
"James Shields is a clarinetist, composer, and educator. He joined the Oregon Symphony as principal clarinet in 2016. Before relocating to Portland he served as principal clarinet of the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto as well as the New Mexico Philharmonic in Albuquerque."
This portrait series captures five significant cultural figures in Portland and Oregon: a musician, actor/director, visual artist, playwright/actor, and writer/editor. The photographer's approach prioritizes documenting the contemporary cultural landscape through honest, direct portraiture. Environmental details are deliberately minimized to allow subjects to occupy the frame without competing distractions. This compositional choice creates a simpler, more intense visual encounter that centers on character as the animating force of each image. James Shields, a clarinetist and composer, serves as principal clarinet with the Oregon Symphony and holds advanced degrees from Juilliard and the University of New Mexico.
Read at Oregon ArtsWatch * Arts & Culture News
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]