Only People

Christophersons portraits are as straightforward as they are revealing.
People are often photographed in their home or a place of work, often objects
surround them or they are surrounded by their personal collections.
This exhibition includes portraits of people aware of being photographed and
others that are candid images, unaware that they are being photographed.

Howard Christopherson creates fine art photographic work revolving in three themes;
People, Places and what he calls Dreams. People, Places and Dreams was the title
of his first exhibit at Wave Gallery. In this exhibit Only People we see images
of people from Christophersons homeland in the USA, and from his travels
to Italy, Japan, Peru and Hungary. Each image in this exhibit is a black and white
medium format film capture. Christopherson then prints each image himself in
a traditional darkroom.

The title Only People expresses Howards value that we all are Only People
regardless of our social status. Howard makes images of all types of people,
successful inventors, gallery owners, photographers, politicians, homeless people,
children, old people, young people, collectors of things, artists and people at work.
Christophersons travels on a constant search for subjects has guided him to the
floating islands on Lake Titicaca, Peru, the grass prairies and governor’s office of the
Midwestern United States, the busy streets of Tokyo, Japan and the back streets
of Budapest, Hungary and Italy.

Christopherson chooses to use his medium format film camera to create this work.
I prefer the honesty of b/w film in this body of work. The film cannot be manipulated,
what you see is what I saw. I also feel it is extremely important to create these images
in the traditional darkroom because I feel much more connected to my work
and also to my subjects.