Jim Lehmann

Welcome to my lens where I try to capture 'humanity' within my photos. I am a social / documentary photographer who expects each photograph to convey feelings, and for the viewer to beg for questions…and, each image must have impact. I am challenging myself by the direction of Fan Ho who used people as incidentals and concentrated on the light, the geometric shapes to compose the high contrast black and white images. As Ho stated 'it provides a sense of distance and separation and is simplified and turns images to the abstract. The world of color is reduced to black, white and gray'.... Sharpness itself is immaterial as Henri Cartier-Bresson would state that 'sharpness is a bourgeois concept'...I agree. Of great influence is the work of Diedo Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira, whose stunning work exemplifies no need for sharpness but bold dark shadows are emphasized. There is even a name for this: ‘bure, boke’, or blur/out of focus.