MATTHEW KAMHOLTZ
-Matthew, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today, both personally and as an artist.
While I have always been interested in photography, I didn't begin to study it seriously until fairly late in life. I studied music and philosophy in college, and worked as a pianist and picture framer in New York City before moving to Boston to attend law school. After graduating from law school in 1982, I worked in the Boston area as a criminal defense lawyer primarily representing indigent clients for 35 years. I retired in 2020.
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I began to immerse myself in photography about 15 years ago, when I took my first photography workshop and fell in love with the workshop process. Since then, I have taken many workshops with some of the great photographers working in the broad documentary tradition, including Nikos Economopoulos, Constantine Manos, Jeff Jacobson, Stella Johnson, and Alex Webb.
-What are the questions that drive your work?​
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When I set out to photograph, I don't have a particular idea or problem firmly in mind before I pick up the camera. My work is always driven in the first instance by the desire to make interesting images, not to tell a predetermined narrative. Unlike video say, I don't think still photography is at heart a narrative form.
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For me, the emotional content of a picture is paramount. The process of focusing on the image, on how the elements within the frame relate to each other to convey meaning and emotion, without being overly concerned about what the meaning or emotion is, allows my personality, experience, and understanding to surface. It isn't until I begin to edit a group of pictures that seem to work together, that I start to see what the pictures are about.
-Do you think the role of artists has changed considering everything that is going on in the world today?
I don't think so. While all art is in some way political, I think the foremost duty of an artist is to make art that engages with the medium to make something new and personal. Particularly in photography, where the image must reflect some fragment of the real world, if the photographer is true to the language of photography, then the picture will inevitably be responsive to the world in some meaningful way that reflects the personality of the photographer.