Thomas Hawk’s Creative Vision

Thomas Hawk. The Scoble Show, Photo Walking With Thomas Hawk. Flickr.

I found my way to Thomas Hawk’s photography last fall when I stumbled upon a new video venture by Robert Scoble called Photo Walking with Thomas Hawk. Scobile interviewed Hawk as he walked along the north shore of Golden Gate Park, shooting pics of the bridge and musing about the daily work of photography and the transition to digital cameras and processing. This image of the Golden Gate Bridge is one of many from that photo shoot. You see it as a cutaway frame inserted in the video. I was impressed by the Internet synergy between process and product: video documentation of still image making: Podtech and Flickr.

I was impressed also by Thomas Hawk’s laid-back obsession with taking photos. He reminded me of how much I have enjoyed working with photographers over the years. (How a blind photo flaneur could do this is a story for another time.) I checked out his blog, Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection, and lately it has been a point of entry into all kinds of issues related to photography.

Hawk is working on a new photo hosting/sharing startup called Zooomr. He still has hundreds of images like this one on his Flickr site, all available under a Creative Commons license (non commercial with attribution). His Flickr profile includes this artist’s statement:

My statement as an artist is to outdo New York’s Little Angel Angelo Rizzuto, who between 1952 and 1966 documented New York City with over 60,000 photos.

We all have but a short time on this earth. As slow as time can be it is also fast and swift and mighty and then it’s over. I have advantages over Rizzuto at present. I get to shoot digital, I’m starting younger than he did and hopefully I’ll live beyond 61. I'm trying to build a library of 500,000 finished, processed fine art photographs before I die.

The absurdity of my obsessive compulsive statement is not lost on me of course. But it is the absurdity of life that I find most beautiful of all. Where Sisyphus had his stone I have my Canon 5D and a bag full of lenses.

Document, explore, lather, rinse, repeat. Photography for me then becomes a kind of hyperactive life documentary, loosely arranged and presented. My work is less about individual images and instead more about the power of a massive amount of excessive and disjointed images -- a mighty rush of water, where stories, characters and places sometimes stay and other times reappear or disappear entirely for no good reason at all.