"...let us always have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things - - men who see beauty in these commonplace things, and delight in showing how kindly the light of heaven falls on them." — George Eliot

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The Site - finkstreetphotography.com

This site launched in September, 2011. It is an outlet for my many years of attempting to do street photography, and for my more recent efforts to teach street photography at Hardin-Simmons University. That began when I was asked to co-teach a course in the HSU Honors Program called "Discourse in Aesthetics" with art professor, Linda Fawcett. Linda covered art history, the philosophy of art, fundamentals of drawing, and even hosted a campout for the class on her lovely Texas hill-country ranch, on the Llano River.

My part of the course involved the aesthetic appreciation of literature and nature, built on readings such as Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, followed by the campout at Linda's. I also taught a unit on photography that introduced major styles (pictorialism, straight photography, street photography, etc.) and the fundamentals of photographic composition. Students then went out with their cameras and tried composing pictures using basic composition principles, a new experience for most of them. Each then submitted their best half dozen images, and I put them together in a PowerPoint show. This proved a popular assignment, and we included it in the course again and again.

Eventually, Linda and I reluctantly relinquished the course to another pair of teachers (Honors classes are fun to teach!). But that lazy pair keeps asking me to guest teach on photography for one class period each semester. Since then, I've taught an Honors student in a directed-studies photography class and a street photography course for the art department in the spring of 2011. To help me develop that course, the University, to my surprise, funded my participation in two street photography workshops led by Peter Turnley in Paris and New York. Currently (fall 2011), I am directing an Honors student who is living and studying—and doing street photography—in New York City.

Soon, I will be posting some of my student's pictures in the site's "Student Gallery." I will also invite interested friends to exhibit their street photography in the "Guest Gallery."

I will continue to add new, and old, work of my own as I have time and as I learn how to run a website. Which brings me to my incredibly talented and patient web designer, Eron Granneman. Eron is currently an HSU student working part-time as a graphic designer for the University. Computer science Professor, Terry Sergeant, heartily recommended her to me as "the best." Thank you, Terry! Eron has taken my vague design ideas and somehow turned them into a smoothly-operating, easy to use website that I'm very proud of. Thank you, Eron!

The Photographer - Larry E. Fink

Est.
Sept. 2011