The Portland Metro Photographic News

Editor's Note: I've had the pleasure of getting to know and appreciate Joseph Cartright and his ground breaking digital images over the past three years. Joseph is not only a gifted photographer but a much sought after educator in all things digital. I am proud to present Joseph to the readers of the Portland Metro Photographic News. I encourage you to visit his radically re-designed website for some mind-blowing and, of course, visionary commercial images that are setting new industry standards.

Joseph Cartright is an acclaimed New York City-based photographer specializing in Beauty, Fashion and Lifestyle Photography. Joseph has been at the forefront of digital photography since its inception in the late 80s. His artistic background and technical education provided the much needed expertise to “Go Digital”.

©Joseph Cartright

The creative process is a funny companion.

For me the creative process is also frustrating! It’s a tug of war between my day’s perspective, emotions, and life’s relentless disturbance. I would imagine, like most photographers, once a creative idea seeds itself the world takes a backseat, much to the disappointment of my immediate life, and not to mention the person I was speaking with at the time. Such was the concept for the image above.

I was chatting with a client on the production for our upcoming shoot when I zoned out. I knew I had zoned out because the client, who luckily happened to be a friend as well, looked at me like I occasionally look at my two year old – with total disbelief and amusement. Apparently, I was making facial expressions that really did relate to what we were discussing, while he was talking directly to me. He was amused and I was frustrated – all I wanted to do at that moment was figure out how to make the idea take shape.

©Joseph Cartright

Truth be told, it took a long time to get here from there. The idea was sparked from passing by one of those infinite repeat mirrors – a two-way mirror boxed in with a regular mirror. The idea was an opportunity to flesh out another ball that was bouncing around in my head – flower petals. The two-way mirror created an infinite repeat receding pattern which was not what I was envisioning - what I wanted was a flowering pattern on the same plane – so that the image sprawled instead of crawled. So, I had some work to do.

I tried various techniques and set designs. There were obstacles to consider, deal with and design around. Eventually this idea and the images it created joined the league of series that people generally liked but I didn’t. Not because the images were bad but because they were not great and not what I wanted to create.

©Joseph Cartright

It took several failed attempts, and many disappointing results before I felt proverbial “love”. Throughout the process I learned many important lessons both personally and technically. It’s my – “dude, you don’t know jack” project. And, it's still evolving and taking me along for the ride.

©Joseph Cartright

For me, satisfaction in my photography is a fleeting sensation that invariably sparks my next visual journey.

- Joseph Cartright