Blake Andrews

I grew up in rural California and moved to Portland, Oregon in 1992, around the same time I became interested in photography.

I took a class and began shooting occasionally, but it wasn’t until I left my day job that it really steamrolled. Now I always carry at least one camera with me, and I shoot a few rolls of BW film daily. I am primarily self-taught and I have only ever taken photographs for myself.

My normal practice is to walk around with a few cameras and a rough sense of expectation, but I never know exactly what I will come across. I have faith in serendipity. Very few good street photos can be completely planned. There is a certain amount of fate that must be injected – usually at the last moment – for a photo to work.

Yet good photos must also be incredibly precise. The slightest thing out of order – an arm two inches lower, a pedestrian’s gaze looking slightly left or right – and the whole photo can fall apart. The ones that work seem to come together completely by accident, and yet also by some inexplicable guiding order. I have no idea what governs that order, but photography helps me to reaffirm that it is there. The search for this order is my primary motivation to photograph every day.

As for the finished product, a photograph either works or it doesn’t. After 13 years of shooting, I still have no recipe for producing photos that work, but I’ve learned to recognize them on the contact sheet. I most enjoy images that are absurd in the way zen koans are absurd – those that are inpenetrable on a certain level.

To see reality reflected plainly and obviously, and yet still defy easy understanding. That’s what I look for in a good photo, I think for the same reason that I enjoy photographing. The nature of existence does not reveal itself easily, nor should it.

After 14 years in Portland, I’ve recently relocated to Eugene (two hours south) with my wife Tabatha, and sons Zane (6), Leo (4), and Emmett (1).

News Stories by Blake Andrews