Matt Williams

Born and raised in Mississippi the first 17 years of my life, I left for my senior year in high school and haven't looked back. Since then, I've called a number of places home, but most of it in Texas - Austin at the moment.

I started taking pictures back when I was a little kid - I still remember that hard, blue, plastic, Kodak with the flash strips to plug into the top, my very first camera. Then, in 2000, I got my first digital cam - a Canon point and shoot, and I fell in love with photography again. Shooting on and off ever since then, nowadays hardly a day goes by that I don't take at least one shot.

In case it's not clear - I've never had any formal education in photography, just what I've picked up mostly by shooting a lot and experimenting with different things.

As for finding my voice in the camera - a friend asked me once if I had "vision" for my photography - it's still nebulous and being worked out. The best I can say for now is that I want to shoot people in a photo-realistic way that feels "snap-shot-y", but without being just another snapshot - i.e. a shot that looks like the photographer just kind of brought the camera to his eye without even giving it a thought and fired a shot off because the moment was right - except that composition, color, light - well, everything, really - happen to work together perfectly. It should have a sort of "documentary/photojournalistic" aesthetic, but most importantly it should have emotional content. That is, I want my photos to convey to the viewer the emotional content of the scene, the emotional content of me when I took the photo, and ideally, reveal something about the viewer's emotional state to him or herself at the moment of seeing the image. Probably lofty goals, but once I achieve that image, I'll feel like I've finally succeeded - and I'll probably stop taking photos. I have feeling I'll still be shooting for a while...

Portfolio

Portraits

Photo Journalism

Projects

Landscapes

Stock Photography

Utata Member Page for Matt Williams