STP 007 Photograph

My name is Adam CK Vollick. I earn my living as a Director/Cinematographer/Editor as a constant collaborator with legendary music producer Daniel Lanois. In what little freetime I have I excercise my interest in physics and fine art photography. I grew up in rural Ontario, on a plot of land between my grandfather's farm and my great uncle's farm. My dad, his dad, and my uncle were all carpenters, and another uncle was a mechanical engineer. My grandfather nearing his retirement rented his farmland to a big farming outfit up the road, so the family barn got converted into a fully functional workshop, complete with a selection of milled hard and soft woods out of the family forest continually curing in the hay mow. My whole family had use of the shop. It had everything for woodworking, welding and machining, a paintbooth, and shop tools for working on vehicles. I spent a great deal of my childhood helping and observing the men of my family build and fix things. They did everything themselves: wiring, plumbing, carpentry, vehicle maintenance, engine overhauls, building woodsplitters and tractor cabs from scratch all with great pride and frugality, and never a complaint among them. I didn't become a tradesmen like my dad, but I do feel like I absorbed the work ethic, pioneering spirit, methodical thinking, diversity and patience that I observed and made it all a part of the person I am today. I fell in love with making images at a very young age. Some of my earliest memories are from staring out the side window of the car as a child, on my way to Grandma's house early in the morning before my Mother went to work. I used to squint real hard at oncoming headlights to make them into starbursts, or stare deep into the forested countryside hoping to see some wildlife while the foreground shrubs streaked by. At the age of six I bought a Kodak disc camera for a quarter (or maybe it was sixty cents), at a garage sale in my small town. I loved it - I needed to know everything about it, and read every book they had in the library about photography. What completely snared me though was entering a darkroom for the first time as a teenager. I watched an image appear on photo paper in a developer tray, after it had been exposed to a projection, and knew that strange magic was within my grasp. It signified a black art that captures energy both visible and invisible. It also allowed me to capture the kind of details I wished I could paint.