Roger Bruce: My Unanticipated Fascination in the Ordinary
My Unanticipated Fascination in the Ordinary
I recently retired from a museum of photography. And following decades of directing fine arts programs with several institutions and agencies I have been drawn to an aesthetic project of my own. It is grounded in my ordinariness and framed by the simple requirement that I carry a digital SLR wherever I go. My photographs are unexceptional in that I do not go out into the world seeking a particular subject, and images are obtained in the course of my routines of maintaining mind, body, and home. Friends have grown to expect my inconvenient camera with every visit. Of course, I am more unexceptional on vacation with my family. A tourist is not distinguished among tourists for the presence of his camera.
My objective is to carry a note-taking device that will never fail to note more than I observe. Returning home with my raw image files I am repeatedly reminded of this truth: that a moment of curiosity sufficient to make an exposure is very likely to provide me with moments of unanticipated fascination.
What significant information inheres in this photograph and how can I make it apparent? Today’s image processing tools, Photoshop and the like, provide unprecedented power to glean meaning from the ordinary. Given a little craft and sustained care, we may use the camera as a tuning instrument to separate signal from noise and to help provide new interpretation to the stuff underfoot and the heretofore easily ignored.
About Roger Bruce
Roger Bruce recently retired from George Eastman House, a museum of photography and film in Rochester New York. He came to Eastman House as guest curator in 1993, joining its senior management staff the following year. In the subsequent decades he served as the Museum’s Director of Interpretation, supervising information management, the Education Department, and other educational initiatives. In the 1980s Mr Bruce was Visual Arts Coordinator with the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, DC. And was later invited to New York City to establish and direct the New York State Artists’ Fellowship Program, providing direct grant support to artists statewide. Curiously, Mr Bruce also worked at Eastman House throughout the 1970s, during and after his graduate studies in film and photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Roger is currently fascinated by the more subtle effects of digital photographic tools on the character of personal image making, especially his own.