Can't remember if I had posted this photograph before. This came out of a fairly large body of work i did while collaborating with Renee Zettle - Sterling back in the 90's while we attended Edinboro University. We made thousands of photographs, mostly on B/w Tri-x film which I developed and printed myself. These were mostly used for references for paintings I was working on for my grad school thesis. Not many of them were really intended to be strictly photographs, but a few became that. This one for instance I feel I couldn't improve on in a painting, I know I sketched out a quick drawing of it, but the background somehow needed to be changed to work for my thesis and it just never came together. The photograph was stronger than the painting. That age old argument - is photography art? Well... I really don't care if it is, but sometimes a photograph is stronger than a painting ever could be, so in that thinking photography stands on its own as something incredibly important and if it is not art--then it is certainly an equal to it and I'd argue strongly that it is perhaps more important than all the other art mediums--at least when practiced by people who give it the care and dedication of a professional or and artist. Photograph by Richar