Christopher Calkins, "Hope", photograph printed on cotton photo rag with Archival pigment, 2012
“Street photography is the art of capturing moments. The quality of those moments is in the photographer’s ability to see and respond.
Seeing is a direct link to one’s awareness of the moment. Sometimes I embark on planned photo safaris, but I always have a camera in hand.
Through the process I learn something about myself and perhaps humanity. I document in order to share what I discover.” — Christopher Calkins
ABOUT THE ARTIST
When Christopher Calkins was twelve, his father, a professional photographer, gave him a camera; in the next sixty years, he has never been without one in hand. It’s been a mirror, a witness and a psychological distillery in a life that Calkins designed as an adventurous exploration: of communities, human interactions and the way individuals in the most specific narrative circumstances refract into our universal shared experience. His life has been about seeing, and the awareness that lies behind it.
Calkins has brought his photographer’s eye to his kaleidoscopic life experience, including the thirty jobs he had by the time he was thirty. He has worked as a stunt cowboy in Old Tucson, Arizona, taught yoga at an ashram, been a construction worker, a car salesman, was named one of Esquire Magazine’s Best Dressed College Men, and worked as a professional model with the Wilhelmina agency. He managed a rock band, and a jazz club, joined AFTRA and drove a New York City cab; was a professional photographer’s assistant, a restauranteur, and started the restaurant division of Starbucks; he co-founded Spinelli Coffee in San Francisco, created his own coffee roasting company in Red Hook, and made wine in the Napa Valley. His camera was the one constant, weaving together captured visual moments and surprise from the panorama of his experience. “A photo,” Calkins believes, “should capture the emotion you feel when you take it.”
Born in Eugene, Oregon, Calkins grew up in Norwalk, CT just outside New York City. Camera in hand, he spent his free time growing up exploring Chinatown and streets of Manhattan. He was present at Woodstock, and at the Beatles’ first appearance at Carnegie Hall. He has created a life where the vantage point of his lens is always surrounded by unending visual riches.
His work has been exhibited on both coasts, and is held in numerous private collections. Calkins lives and works in Manhattan.