When I was 12 or 13, my parents bought me a Kodak Reflex camera and I went out and tried to create imitations of some of the wonderful black and white images I'd seen in U.S. Camera (excluding the nudes, of course). I remember standing on the dock at our cottage on Cayuga Lake one early morning and framing in my camera lens a drooping willow branch and its curved reflection in the water: a winning image that I sent off to some photo contest. I never heard back from them, so I went off to do other things with my life: working for a business systems company, teaching Theatre, English & Public Speaking at Vestal High School, acting at the Cider Mill Playhouse and other places, getting married, having children, becoming a grandparent--stuff like that.

But I always took photographs. Thousands of photographs. Sometimes with my Kodak 128, my first 35 millimeter camera, which had no exposure meter or range finder, so all the exposure settings had to be guessed at--sometimes with my Olympus OM-1, an indestructible camera I've had for 25 years, and sometimes with a Canon Elan 2 E, my newest camera.

I guess, as that kid on the dock, I discovered that creating photographs is a kind of meditation, a focusing of attention on something outside of myself, on an ordered image that exists only in the viewfinder of the camera, an image that I can create by choices of framing, lenses, filters, and exposure settings. I found that I enjoyed that kind of meditation and creation. These photographs are an attempt to share some of those moments of attention paid to the image in a viewfinder, a "viewfinder moment." Hopefully, they create a meditative moment for the viewer.

William Gorman
March 19, 2000

Bill Gorman's photographs and cards have also been exhibited or sold at Barnes & Noble Gallery, Java Joe's, The Art Mission, Gallery 41 in Owego, Toms Gifts, Goddess, and The Purple Pelican.