Having grown up in a large city, in this case Detroit, mainly in the 1950s and 1960s, I was always aware of the presence of the buildings, the concrete, they way they loomed over, surrounded and, yes, enveloped the people who lived in them.

When I started taking photographs and working in the darkroom in the 1960s I found I was fascinated by the light, the hard surfaces, their texture and the contrast of the hard surfaces and the the cloth covered shapes of the inhabitants that populated the spaces these surfaces enclosed. Only much later I found I had begun to produce a good many of these sorts of images, in different cities, different light, with different textures.

When the call came for entries for 2017 Rfotofolio Call, I had recently scanned a negative shot in 1984, when I moved away from Detroit, of a mother and child, waiting for a bus near an overpass, and was working on printing it.  I had not looked at it for more than 20 years.  In exploring my negatives and image files, there were many images with relationships to this photograph—threads, running through my work— all conveying the sense of envelopment within which the figures populating my photographs seemed to exist.  They feel like they belong together and might be viewed together.

This thread is one that continues to be explored and has lead to other threads involving other types of subjects and feelings:  surface textures, evidence of past human habitation in empty spaces, jazz musicians and others.

What lies ahead is the exploration of the visual territory that includes the origin of these threads in my own past and the exploration of these evolving ideas on into the future.

Norm Snyder

Envelopment New Orleans © Norm Snyder

Envelopment Detroit © Norm Snyder

Envelopment San Miguel de Allende © Norm Snyder

Envelopment No. 4 Crystal Bridges © Norm Snyder

To learn more about the work of Norm Snyder please visit his page at Norm Snyder.