About

My interest in photography began when my father - himself a keen amateur, with published work to his credit - handed me one of his old cameras to play with when I was a child. He had an area of our house that could be set up as a darkroom, and I still remember even now the excitement of seeing prints coming to life in the developer bath and then wanting to see if my new "toy" could somehow work the same magic.

My first serious camera of note, however, was an Olympus OM10, a tool I used to learn the real fundamentals of photography. It gave great service for many years, especially shooting in and around Sussex, the UK and Europe, right up until the point when all my gear was stolen in the mid '80s while I was a student in Brighton ....

With no money to replace anything, I stopped taking photographs and moved on, accruing along the way a degree in electronics and a PhD in computer science, jobs as varied as teaching, research, management consulting and being a CEO, and, in 1998, a transatlantic move to California along with Susan, my wife & fellow artist, and Caitlin, our dog, who wasn't artistic in any way at all!

However, although perhaps dormant for a while, the urge to photograph never went away and once the Canon 20D came out, being the first real consumer digital SLR with decent performance, I decided to jump back in and start again to capture the world as I see it. That was some seven years ago now and so what you see here represents the current state of my photographic journey since then.

From an early age I have always been drawn to the graphic: line drawings; geometric forms; studies in monochrome. In short, I love the way a great photograph reduces the world around us to its key constituents & nothing more. This, therefore, is the basic ethos driving my photography, and it's perhaps unsurprising that as a result I end up working in black-and-white a lot of the time!

As far as artistic influences go, I've always loved works by the great print makers, engravers and artists of the 16th through 19th century, including Dürer, Brueghel, Hogarth, Piranesi and (William) Blake, as well as Rembrandt, Goya and others. However, many of the great 20th century artists, such as Mondrian, Miró, Kandinski and others, have also contributed greatly to pushing forwards the boundaries of trying to see the world in a highly reductive way, yet all the while producing art that can still convey great complexity and beauty.

In terms of photographers whose work has impacted me, the roster is far too long to capture here, though Bill Brandt and André Kertész deserve special mention, as of course do Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. However, I am also compelled to include Michael Kenna in this list as he really showed me a new and particular way of seeing at the world through photography, one that combines simplicity of form yet still conveys a high level of emotional involvement.

Please do drop me a line if you have any comments or questions, or indeed commissions as I'm always interested in taking on additional commercial work.

If you would like to purchase prints of any of the images shown here then please e-mail or call me. Unframed prints run in price from $150 to $500, depending on size and how complex the image is to print to my satisfaction.

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E-Mail: John@lambertphotographic.com

Phone: 1 408 872-8717