Photographer Mark Steinmetz joined us on campus last Wednesday at the invitation of Assistant Professor of Art Gary Green to share and discuss his work with the Colby community. Steinmetz has published three books of photographs and his work has been exhibited at many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Photography, Steinmetz said, is about being "awake and alive to the moment...available to chance." The intention of the photographer in the moment of creation is to capture a feeling in an image when the opportunity presents itself.


"I'm a literary photographer," Steinmetz said, as his photography captures moments that suggest a story. "You'll see a moment, and in that moment there's a kind of shock...they're not large dramas." Steinmetz ran a slideshow of his work that included a series of Little League photographs presenting the viewer with a mini-drama of the child faced with adult pressures.

Steinmetz finds a way through his work to "extract an image from an event," as he put it. And black and white photography, he said, aids this extraction. He works almost exclusively in the black and white medium saying, "I think black and white is more purely about light [than color is]."

The photograph itself frames the image, and the black and white further displaces that image from life's narrative flow. It highlights that moment and separates it from the life we live in color daily. Steinmetz's interest in metaphor lends a depth to his imagery. He sees the possibility of the photograph to be "a kind of visual poetry."

When one looks at a photograph, the experience of the image should be multi-dimensional. As a young photographer, Steinmetz would look through Time-Life books of photography and he could "see the picture and get it, and the experience was kind of over." With his own photography, Steinmetz hopes to convey that shock, that "something sudden is happening."

As a photographer, searching for these moments, he said "the truth is you never really know what you're doing. You have a vision, and sometimes you have a lot of confidence... When it comes together it just seems like there are larger things than me and my will."

Steinmetz's overarching vision is to capture modern American life. "I want [my] three books together to be a good take on our civilization." He does not stick to one "type" of photo, but works indoors and outdoors, taking portraits and landscapes alike, endeavoring to create "a catalogue of things that are happening."

"For people in the future I kind of want to be a guide," Steinmetz said.