Patrick Allen

Why take a photo?

I try to find that which peaks out from behind our everyday experience. The incongruous, the decaying, the new, and the beauty overlooked; these are the subjects I try to find. My photography came out of my daily walk at lunch, I began to take pictures of those things that seemed to stand out from the rest and since then I have been on the hunt to capture that which the mind and the eye cannot fully resolve.

I am not quite sure what photography is, we force a machine to record a pattern of light that is bounced off of real things and then contort, correct, and process the result until we display it. Somehow after this happens there is a distinction between the results, we say that some are good and some bad, some we call pictures or photographs, some beautiful and ugly, and some we might even call art.

What is the end of all of of this? Most days it’s to get a good walk in, but beyond that I am looking for an answer to these questions, a pattern in the results, find what works and what doesn’t and try to explain that glint that hints at something behind the curtain.