I am a fine art and commercial photographer living and working in Southern California. I seek to illuminate the extraordinary in the ordinary and to use photography as a time machine. Not in the sense of time travel, although photography is invaluable as means of capturing the present for the future, but as a means of freezing time. A photograph gives one the tool to suspend time, and allows one to take the time necessary to  immerse oneself in the picture and fully absorb the emotional responses the picture invokes. I also hope to use my photography to challenge our conventional perceptions and programmed responses, to provoke us to look around and beyond our carefully constructed blinders. To set aside our preconceived notions of what is beautiful, and open our eyes to something that we would normally reject without looking at, without ever really seeing.

 I became involved in my "Echoes" project while wandering in the magnificent and mysterious deserts of Southern California. I've always been entranced by the desert, and I was documenting the ruins of structures people had left behind when they abandoned some location for one reason or another. I've always been fascinated by decay, and here you often see decay working on a large scale. While photographing the exteriors, I found myself becoming increasingly fascinated by the interiors of the structures I was shooting. In some cases it seemed as though the people living in them had just gotten up and walked away, leaving everything behind. Pictures, clothes, mementos, almost as if they had abandoned their lives. And these interiors seemed to hold some trace, some echo of their past inhabitants. I found them to be achingly beautiful and I had to attempt to capture them.

 I was doubly blessed because in many cases these locations provided me with the perfect canvases to pursue another project I am working on, "The Price of Chaos". Whenever man strives to alter nature, nature immediately starts to work, usually on a small scale, to destroy man's false constructs, and return the environment to a natural state. All too often we never pause to view that small world, and see these beautiful images These pictures are macro abstracts of the random and changing patterns that natures agent, decay, has painted on the debris man left behind.

I am also currently working on a project called "A Black and White L. A. Night". I am striving to capture the Downtown Los Angeles that most of us never see as we pass thru the downtown area on the 110 or the 101 freeways. When I first conceived this project I thought that it couldn't be done, that there wouldn't be enough light, but as I proceeded I realized that downtown was awash with light from a myriad of sources. There was hard and soft light, direct, reflected, and ambient light, bright and faint light,  and always the dark seeking to recapture those small islands of illumination It was truly a revelation. I've always seen black and white photography as being about the elements in the picture, about lines and angles and the perpendicular meeting the parallel. This project is about capturing the hard lines of what is lit meeting the hidden lines and gradients of what is in shadow.

In  2004 and 2005 I was awarded 1st Place for Fine Art in the prestigious national juried competition for new photography at the Millard Sheets Gallery. In the fall of 2004 I started the Lens Fusion photography group with photographer S. J. Schulman for the purpose of promoting alternative photography processes. My work has been exhibited in juried exhibitions at the Riverside Art Museum, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the Palos Verdes Art Center, M. J. Higgins Fine Art, numerous other gallery shows, and is in private collections across the United States and in Europe. I do all of my own printing in the darkroom from my original negatives in signed and numbered limited editions and no digital processes of any kind are used at any stage in the reproduction of these images. All images are copyrighted, and any reproduction without prior written permission is prohibited. I can be reached at 1-877-254-9665, and emailed at martin@mjwaterman.com. Thank you for visiting my site, and I hope you have enjoyed my work.

Martin J. Waterman.