Bruce Kirschner Photographer
Street & Fine Art Photographer and a Writer
Tel: 845.772.7346 / Email: bkirschnerphotog@me.com
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Read MoreMy name is Bruce Kirschner, and I'm a New York City based Street & Fine Art Photographer, and a Writer. I specialize in candid portraiture, abstractions and distractions, warnings and admonitions, and wry observational humor. My first book, "I've Almost Forgotten What Love Isn't," was published in 2013, and is available on blurb.com. My second book, an expanded photo monograph of my recent NYC gallery show "New York Noir," is currently in progress, and is scheduled for publication in 2019.
Only recently have I been able to define why it is that I like to photograph people candidly, often from behind and often in shadow or silhouette. Simply stated, it's that when you photograph people candidly, you get to capture what you see, and not what your subject wants to show you to see.
Most often it's not the person in the picture that attracts me as much as the way that they carry themselves. It's the things that they do, a certain gesture perhaps, a certain expression - kinesiology. People just going about their lives, caught in that one unguarded moment, without postures or pretenses. That's what most immediately catches my eye, and to date that what I've been able to effectively communicate to my viewers.
As to my photographic style, that's evolved over nearly five decades. A consciously unconscious competency that comes with knowing and trusting my eye and my camera. With knowing the strengths and the limitations of both, and knowing how to make them work to my subjective satisfaction.
Clearly, I have a definite preference for publishing my work in black & white, which is simply a by-product of my having begun my career shooting Kodak's wonderfully grainy Tri-X film, and my lifelong fondness for dramatic abstractions comprised of dark shapes, deep shadows and sharp contrasts.
So said, I’m a street photographer. This is what I do, and this is what I love. When the noted photographer Bill Cunningham died, a colleague wrote an obit in which they called him an "urban anthropologist." When enough time has passed, I plan to steal that description for myself.