btezra

Utata Member

Testimonial

It is the faces. And the stories. The careful and compassionate chronicling of lives that have seen too much weather and booze and too little hope. If you take the time to truly experience the world as this man sees it you can't help but become more sensitive to the forgotten people, the old people, the street people, the people we don't easily see. Craig's camera rubs the callouses away and then abrades our raw nerve endings.

His aesthetic and his own moral compass are locked together and steer true. In his own words from Leonard, street portrait:

"The simple fact is I cannot ignore people, I cannot help but do what is right. Long ago, when I was young, naive, stupid, I may have never given it a thought to do something that wasn't required of me...I went through a period when it was all me all the time, and to be honest w/ ya, that was the worst time of my life."

His photographs are as much about giving as taking, he does not exist as a dispassionate observer insulated by layers of aspherical multicoated telephoto distance from his subjects. They crawl through the eyepiece and into him, and then, into us.

Lest I give the impression that Craig limits his photography to the down and out, that is not the case. He celebrates life in all its forms and expressions, from the grittiness of the street, to protests covering the incendiary issues of the day, the titanic struggles of sports teams in triumph and loss, to the cityscapes of his Pittsburgh which he paints with an eye to its hidden beauty.

Take a walk with this man someday, he will leave you changed.

Testimonial written by David Elliott