Jack Montgomery

photography

"I love painting.  Winslow Homer, James McNeill Whistler, the Ashcan School, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, Vilhelm Hammershoi and a host of others- they all move me. For years I photographed in black and white on film.  Then, as now, I love the medium.  But throughout that period I envied painters and their ability to embrace a palette, to create fictional spaces and characters, to rely upon surfaces and textures and create lighting to capture a mood or emotion.

The issue for me is not to create a photograph that looks like a painting.  Rather, the opportunity is to create an image that comes closer to the visions that I have carried in my head and which move me.  It is the melding of elements of both photography and painting that intrigues me.  I aim for a dialogue between the two.  I find that visual conversation enriching.

These images of girls and young women coming of age in a rural environment reflect a subject studied by many of the painters whose work I so admire."