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RAYMOND GEHMAN’S ARTIST STATEMENT;“YARDWORKS” JULY 2008I’ve never been much of an “inside the house” person. As a kid, I was always outside until the last moment of available light. Baseball, football, basketball, dodge ball, any ball thing, riding bikes like cut- throat pirates, tearing up and down neighborhood streets…I even enjoyed mowing the grass, just because I was outside! After graduating from high school, I was faced with three options, none of them good;
Luckily, I discovered photography, which allowed me to hang on to my kid-like wonder of life as I wandered and explored the great outdoor world. Unfortunately, under the Rules of Life, circa 1969, this was not a viable option for an eighteen year old boy-child. As sure as sunrise and sunset, I was drafted and suddenly found myself a soldier. A great karmic turn of events had me serving in Germany instead of the dreaded ‘nam, where I bought myself the first of many to come 35mm cameras and wandered around Europe in my free time. To this day, I’m convinced the unlucky fate of being drafted by a war-time lottery is what lead to my discovery that I am a photographer of life, drawn to preserve in a frame the wide open world underneath the sun and the stars.. I’ve always wandered around the yards and gardens of the places I’ve lived. As a teenager, my parents gave me my first camera, a click and presto Polaroid. My parent’s yard became my sole focus for a long time, and I was happy with that. Even to this day, I love wandering around our yard during the golden light of day’s end. And as the blues of twilight wash over the shadows around my feet, then creep up into the trees and beyond to the sky until all is an indigo hue of blue, I find myself even more enraptured with the capture of the common land, because all is now a magical kingdom of surreal mystery. |
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