Artist's Statement
I have been capturing images with a camera of one sort or another for over 40 years, but it was only recently that I became a photographer. And I don't mean that I turned an avocation into a vocation -- nice thought but it has not happened, yet.
I actually became a photographer several months following my second gallery show in 2007 when several people, quite independently, told me about seeing things around them in new light and saying to themselves,
"That's a Dave Corliss photograph."
What a great thing to have happen!
If I may be so bold as to modify a Dorothea Lange quote slightly, "a [photographer] is an instrument that teaches people to see the world without a camera." With that thought I finally realized I was a photographer. The irony is that some of the images that stimulated the viewers' reactions noted above date back to the '60s. I guess that means that I have been a photographer all along but never quite believed it. There is still resonance in what have done and continue to do, as I describe in "The Resonant Image."