Richard Maack on the day of his first photograph, 1951
When I was three years old my parents gave me a Kodak Brownie Target Six-20 camera. I like to think that that camera and those first photographs, inspired the forty-plus-year career as a professional photographer that followed ...
I've spent most of my career as a commercial/editorial photographer, primarily working for magazines and print publication. I always considered myself a generalist, so I've worked with a wide variety of cameras and formats, from 8x10 film cameras to the most current digital imaging equipment. My subject matter has been equally diverse professionally, and includes architecture, landscape architecture, travel, food and restaurants, people and lifestyle and other editorial assignments. For ten years, from 1996 to 2006, I was the photography editor at Arizona Highways magazine, and then for much of the following decade, traveled widely internationally working for National Geographic Expeditions.
I really don't have a preference for a particular camera format or photographic subject, I just love the process of making images. I see photographs. Everywhere.
If I was blessed with a talent, that is it.
I used to tell my workshop students that, "You don't make photographs with a camera. You make them with your brain", arguing that a good photographer could take literally any kind of camera and come back with an interesting image. That philosophy animated the Brownie camera photographs on this site.