Heeding the call of bread and butter, I early on embarked on a string of editorial ‘careers’, each labeled for the types of assignments I was considered suitable for. Magazine stories tend to be centered on people – who they are or what they wear – but the locations they took me too fuelled another curiosity, and so I went further afield, understanding I had another, more fulfilling, gig up my sleeve. That was when the difference between the photograph you make and the photograph you take became very clear to me.
A Wandering Eye airs this personal cabinet of curiosities, an inventory of 35mm slides, taken from day one and onward, until the color slide itself became history. All the photographs are of the “taken” variety, scenes that I came upon without premeditation, recorded on the fly – and arrogantly, with never more than one exposure. I would revisit them now and then in order to feel better about what I’d done with my life, and if I kept them to myself all this time, it had a lot to do with never feeling comfortable with the traditional color print, whose coated surface I felt got in the way of looking.
Much has changed. Putting this book together gave the relationship that sprang up between two images facing one another significance beyond mere layout considerations. Images are formally made up of many elements, and the juxtapositions point to a number of them. They also highlight similarities and differences between cultures, yet in certain cases the pairing process was simply intuitive.
Some of these pictures go back to the early 1970s, and much of what they show doesn’t exist any more. That doesn’t make them look old to me. Human nature changes more slowly than the world it inhabits, and that is at the heart of what makes life bearable.
Eric Boman
Eric Boman: A Wandering Eye: Photographs 1975–2005
Published by Damiani
$45
