A Hungry Eye

One reason noted photographer Chip Simone has lived in Virginia-Highland for the past 40 years, he says, is “it’s a real neighborhood” where you know your neighbors, look after their kids, share the keys to each other’s houses.

In that way, it’s warm and predictable.

But when he ventures forth into his adopted city to take the kinds of evocative pictures for which he’s become known  –  like a midway in the rain, a street character called the Birdman, an older runner sprawled across a city bench – whether he’s on foot or bicycle or tooling around in the car, the Worcester, Mass. native is looking for just the opposite.

“I like the unexpected most of all,” said Simone, a sampling of whose latest work is on view at the in an exhibit called, “The Resonant Image: Photographs by Chip Simone.”

“I like to walk in the back alleys and industrial areas – places that are more textured, less manicured. Things that are more manicured are less interesting to people like me.”

In them, he finds the kind of beauty he’s made distinctly his own.

“It’s a process of discovery, invention and improvisation – like jazz music.”

So, I wondered – when he goes out into the city to shoot, is he looking for anything particular? Or is he just open to whatever presents itself?

“Yes,” he said, “ but I don’t wait – I actively engage my environment. I look for whatever that day presents to me – sometimes it’s texture and patterns, or an encounter with some eccentric person. I never know.”

About ten years ago, Simone started working exclusively in color. (In fact, he says, he donated his darkroom to and his old camera to a school in Worcester, Mass.) It wasn’t until 2000 or so, he said, that he believed the technology of digital photography had evolved enough to give the photographer the kind of “gravitas and presence” he wanted, without having to hand-tool every step of the process, from film and paper stock to darkroom and printing.

It was a revelation that changed the way he works. And the switch didn’t mean he was taking pictures in color, he says – but with color.

Pictures in this exhibit of 64 images taken in Atlanta, Worcester, Chicago and New York – which is not a completed project, Simone stresses, but very much ongoing – are grouped by threes and fours and sixes.

The way they’re arranged along the gallery’s stark white walls brings out their kinship of color or line, subject or mood. A particularly strong grouping against a back wall is rich with vibrant reds, blues and green shapes. In another grid of four photos, the curves of a rearview mirror echo in the line of a fashion model’s leg.

The resonance between the works wasn’t clear to him until he and High curators Julian Cox and Brett Abbott started putting the show together.

“It was as much a revelation to me as taking each picture,” Simone said. “I discovered a body of really striking work, and was delighted to find these linkages.”

Over the years, he’s shot hundreds of thousands of frames, but lately, Simone said, he’s getting more discriminating and economical; he’s editing as he goes.

“I like to make pictures,” he said. “Sometimes I just take pictures because I like to hear the camera work. Like practicing your running scales if you’re a musician, to keep your chops. For me, to maintain hand eye coordination, to keep my sense of timing. I do it for that reason, to remind myself of what the camera will do for me when I see something that I think will really make a good picture.”

So – does he ever leave the house without a camera?

“Sure,” he said. “You don’t need a camera to do photography. Photography at its point of origin, is not dissimilar from the point of writing a poem. Something triggers a response and you have to give it form.

“I see pictures all the time.  I don’t necessarily record them all the time – but it doesn’t mean I’m not doing photography. It’s what I do. I’m thinking about it when I go to sleep at night.”

“The Resonant Image: Photographs by Chip Simone” is at the High Museum of Art through Nov. 6. 1280 Peachtree Street, N.E. www.high.org. See also the companion book called “Chroma: Photographs by Chip Simone,” from Nazraeli Press in association with the High Museum of Art, available at the museum at a discount.

To see samples of Simone's work, visit www.high.org/Art/Exhibitions/The-Resonant-Image.aspx