DYLAN CHORNEAU :: Photographer, Painter, Good Buddy
I have talked about my friend Dylan Chorneau on this blog before, but I love him so much I'd like to do it again.
Dylan is a photographer, but he's more importantly an image-maker, a distinction that gets lost sometimes I think. It is easy for uneducated dummies like me, and even regular-ole educated dummies, to forget that photography is a science and discipline and an artform, not just a legion of high-school students taking pictures of stairwells and ashtrays and elbows.
To strip the label even further, let's call Dylan just a maker, like many of us with a hard-to-satisfy creative passion. We make things, we construct them, we arrange and build and tear down and rearrange until we are satisfied, though we are rarely satisfied. We are engineers and architects, sonata and sonnet writers, painters and photographers. We are often many of these at the same time.
I was looking at some of Dylan's photos one time and made a comment about one of them being unflattering to a friend of ours--she's a beautiful woman, so it really stuck out. Dylan looked at me like I had grown a second nose beside the first. "I'm not interested in making people look good," he said, "as much as I am in making pictures look good." Dylan is just as comfortable talking about apertures and light meters as he is Velazquez and Van Eyck. He could talk for hours about Rembrandt's "light sculpting" technique, or baking the perfect pizza crust, or his son's first potty-training victory.
I've known Dylan since we were both teenagers, we entered adulthood together, I was lucky to be the best man at his wedding. It is inspiring to be around him, his restless creativity gets my own fired-up, knocks the ideas loose from the various stalactites and recesses of my brain. Over just the last couple of years he's moved into photography, and is already ridiculously skilled at it. I would love to see him get rich from it too. I am super ready to show up Entourage-style for some of that money.
You can see a wild plethora of Dylan's photos and paintings on his Flickr page. Enjoy yourself!
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