"America July 17" Print

"At the end of life, we are left with these artworks as valuable memories and often they are passed onto the next generations. They take on a life past our own." Mark Imhoof Photography and Applied Arts Flagler Beach, Florida - Photographer for travel, street, GoPro action sports, event and portrait photography using Fujifilm X-T2, GoPro Hero 7 Black, Fujifilm XP -90, Motorola Moto e cameras. - Personal History and Legacy Interviewer - Surfboard Designer and Shaper I admire applied art that serves both an aesthetic as well as a practically useful purpose, which is why I am attracted to photography, creating surfboards by hand and interviewing people. The reason that I create in these three distinct ways is that each allows me a chance to give myself and others something emotional and uniquely useful, a blink in time that will never occur again in exactly the same way. At the end of life, we are left with these artworks as valuable memories and often they are passed onto the next generations. They take on a life past our own. A camera is a unique machine that allows a person to capture photographic moments, very special brief windows in time of a kind of enlightened perception. This little time/light machine forces the photographer to live in the very moment. This is rare for the human mind, a mind always either planning, plotting or thinking of past or future. Because taking pictures is capturing time, it can be as equally frustrating as well as rewarding. Those moments that I miss are upsetting to the point of an obsession to look at the world around me as photographs and attempt to catch as many of those unique moments as I can that are worth pushing the shutter. I am especially attracted to photographing colorful people, very old trees, and Americana. Three of my favorite artists are Mark Cohen for his daring street photography, Dennis Stock is a fantastic travel photographer and Eugene Richards for his documentary work. I am self taught and spend hours either watching video, listening to or reading from the experts. I have studied John Hedgecoe’s course “Complete Photography” and MIT Professor Bill Cohen’s course “Documentary Photography and Photojournalism."