CAROLYN BROWN

ARTIST STATEMENT

I look back on my life and wonder:  What was it that made me go the places I went and do the things I did?  I produced two large bodies of work:  One: Middle East and Two: Mexico, as well as Texas, Canada, and the Rocky Mountain states.  Now, at age 85 years, I ask myself if I would have the inspiration to do that again?  Answer is: “Uncertain”.  But what was it that made me do what I did?

We are our own photographs. We are our own art!   The activity of thinking, bending, blending and breaking the old and familiar through ideas and putting together elements we know and making them into something new and different is “just being human”, and is unique with each one of us.  It’s the way the brain works.  One’s background, experiences and knowledge determines style, subject matter and direction of a body of work. 

 Photography is at the very center of my being—if it’s not documenting far away places and antiquities, it’s people--culture and human differences.  One cannot escape our fascinating cultural makeup.  Consider the Vegetable Market at Chichicastenango, Guatemala, or the daily longhorn drive at the Fort Worth Stockyards.  Or even the various colorful faces of Mexican Hats, roses and daisies as they wildly dance in the breeze.

For me, the importance of photography is that it documents time.  The beauty of photography is that by looking at a photograph, one can immediately experience long-ago moments, even bits of the lives people lived thousands of years ago—where, how and who they worshiped, and where they walked, worked, lived and loved.