My Photographic History

I've been taking photos since I was eight, when my parents gave me my first camera. For some reason, though, I didn't really get serious about it until the spring of 1996, when I began taking classes at the Photographic Center School here in Seattle. Actually, that's not strictly true -- I've been serious about it for a long time, but (aside from a few classes in college) I had never studied it formally. But in my usual fashion I've done an enormous amount of experimenting and reading on my own.

One of the results of that experimentation are my polaroid transfers. My taste in imagery in general runs to the slightly distorted, to not-quite-reality, which I think is what attracted me to this medium. If you're interested in the process, check out Holly Francis Dupre's excellent document describing how polaroid transfers are made.

The first place that I really started taking a lot of pictures was when my family and I lived in China from 1980-1982 and 1985-1986. That experience gave me an enduring love of travel, and of trying to capture what it is that defines for me wherever it is I've gone. In the spring of 1993, I spent six weeks in Japan, in the northern prefecture of Aomori. I was there to visit my future wife, Becky, who was teaching English in a Japanese school on the JET program. While she was in classes all day, I spent a lot of time doing what I love best: wandering around and taking pictures.

My first real "body of work" (in the sense of a group of photos with a coherent thought behind them) was Memories of Dreams. There's an artist's statement there, which explains as well as I can what this series is about. Several images from this series have been shown around Seattle.

My most recent body of work is called Big Dark Town, and it's a collection of photos taken on the busses and in the bus tunnels in downtown Seattle. The title came to me one night while I was printing and listening to a Tom Waits song, "Underground". A lot of the inspiration for and influences on my work comes from musical and literary sources, rather than from other photographers. In the case of Big Dark Town, it was an interesting feedback loop: The title fit most of the photos, but it also helped me to choose which of the photos I had shot on the busses fit together in this body of work.

If you have questions or comments about any of the photos here, or you'd like to offer me large sums of money for any of them, please contact me at dae@davidadam.com.