Woodstock Opera House

Title

Woodstock Opera House

Artist

Roger Passman

Medium

Photograph - Photographic Prints/limited Edition Prints/licensing

Description

Woodstock is a city in and the county seat of McHenry County, Illinois, United States, located 51 miles (82 km) northwest of Chicago. The city's downtown includes a historic turn-of-the-century town square, which is anchored by the landmark Woodstock Opera House and Old McHenry County Courthouse. The city was named one of the nation's Dozen Distinctive Destinations in 2007 by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

I photographed the Opera House using a 19mm focal length lens straight on from across the street. Upon conversion to black and white the sky was washed out. To fix this problem I replaced the sky with one that fit the image yet still maintaining the original force of the sky to the image. To all those purists out there I must remind them of the words of the great Walker Evans:

With the camera, it's all or nothing. You either get what you're after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. I don't think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing.

I once read that Evans also said that the genius of photography comes with editing and he said that he would do anything to make his image better than what the camera took.

So in the spirit of Walker Evans, I too would do anything to make my images reveal that which I wish to re-present to an audience. When something does not work, I will fix it. I will replace it. I will re-create what I saw. A photograph is art because the artist hands his audience a whisper of something, a flicker of reality in a confined frame of the photographers choosing. It is something of a close reading of that which once was but only in the mind and skill of the photographer that is re-presented to the audience.
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A limited edition of 25 prints signed and numbered by the photographer are availabl

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August 15th, 2016

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