More about Henri

I still work mostly out of a messy, cramped apartment in New York. With the number of photographs I try to maintain on this website, there are many which you won't like and hopefully many which you will enjoy. True to my philosophy of life, I don't want to narrow my portfolio to the best of the best because you may find a diamond in the rough among my 2nd best images.

The Nude is a perfect vehicle for delivering an emotional response since few of us fail to react to a nude image. The challenge for the photographer is to sway the observer away from the pornographic to embrace the human form as art and a celebration of life, humanity, and sexuality.

My work explores the abstraction of the human form free from an environmental element. The curvilinear qualities of the body in direct contrast to the rectilinear flat, emptiness of black space provide tension between ground and foreground weaving form and cosmos together. Combined, they journey through contemplation, melting and resurfacing like the atmosphere in which they reside.

My aesthetic practice is a combination of minimalism with the philosophy of how the body "thinks" through unmediated perception, rather than through reason and language. This approach of "being" and "nothingness" captivates the viewer through a primeval manifestation of their senses.

Influenced by the aesthetics of photographers such as Connie Imboden and Robert Mapplethorpe, my photography continues to be a process of deep introspection, clarifying and making visual the reality of my life and concerns at that particular moment in time and space whenever I press my shutter.

No digital post-process manipulation or distortion is performed. The images captured are identical to what is seen through my lense and what I desire to share with the viewer.

Henri was born to a pair of self-centered, off-center parents in blizzard which crippled much of the North-Eastern United States.  The house in which he lived was sold out from under him, a few years after his father moved in with his third wife.  With no where else to live at the age of thirteen, he was sucked into a religious cult and shared a single bathroom with a dozen teen-age girls.  The five-year experience crippled his natural social development and left him depressed, mentally destroyed, and emotionally withdrawn.

As so many other social outcasts, Henri turned to Science Fiction and computer programming.  Back in his day, computers were big, monster machines run by egghead scientists.  The highschool which he attended used his enthusiasm for computers as a weapon of discipline.  The school's computers were locked behind a solid, oak door and he was forbidden to use them.  The highschool strongly counseled him to forget his dream of being a computer programmer, while taking up a vocational trade e.g. auto mechanic or ditch digger.

Henri dropped out of highschool, told them all where to shove it, and graduated from evening college with a G.P.A. of 3.94 in Computer Science some twelve years later.  With no help from his parents, he charged most of the tuition on a credit card, declaring bankruptcy soon after graduating.  One of the fringe benefits of attending a Liberal Arts college was his pursuit of six credits in Photography.

College level photography is not the "Easy A" which everyone thinks it is.  During a grueling five week winter photography course, during a most frigid and snowy evening, a cute, Spanish middle-age'd co-ed followed Henri home to model for him.  Thanks partly to a large, chilled bottle of Ammereto in back of his refrigerator, partly thanks to the ninety pound frame of the little lady, all inhibitions were lost.  Unexpectedly, but without regret, Henri began his pursuit of nude photography that evening.

Thanks to the generous queue of young ladies willing to drop their clothes for the sake of artistic photography, Henri has been involved with corrupting amateur models and under-paying professional models for the past decade.  Henri understands the folly of fine-art photography, for in a capitalist society any image which does not have commercial value has no value at all.  Few patrons of the Internet understand black and white photography, except as something "neat" to do in Adobe Photoshop.  Far more people on The Net are more interested in surfing for porn, spamming, credit card fraud, and hacking into computers.  And, most amateur models are now interested in pursuing glamour modeling as a "career," rather than posing for fine-art nudes, which have little monetary value.

This website represents a diversification into color, digital, landscape, and other genres.  While the decade long pursuit of black and white nude photography has left him visually over-stimulated looking at nude women, has shortened his life by inhaling chemical fumes in an unventilated bathroom darkroom, and has made him cynical from being spammed by hundreds of pieces of unsolicited email every week, this website stands on its own, both as a representation of Henri's pursuit of this madness he calls fine-art photography, as well as having an inorganic life of its own.

More about me...