Bob Haft

A Visual Diary

These photos are from a large body of work entitled \"Excerpts from a Visual Diary.\" This is a series of photographs that I have been working on for over 20 years that deals with the day-to-day lives of my three children. I have tried to document their world as openly and honestly as possible without posing or interfering with them. Since my camera and I were more-or-less a continual fixture in their lives, thankfully my kids never learned to pose but allowed me to see their interactions like the proverbial \"fly on the wall.\" Like many other photographers before me, I have been interested in finding the marvelous in the commonplace, in trying to raise ordinary experiences to the level of extraordinary ones by giving them visual weight. My intentions were not only to record what I saw, but also to provide an alternative---or maybe an antidote---to the many photographs I see that trivialize or romanticize childhood. If there is beauty in the photographs, I hope it\'s because there is truth in them as well.

Photographer

Bob Haft

I was born and raised in Walla Walla, Washington, which may account for the surrealistic bent to some of my images. For nearly 40 years I taught Photography and Art History at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where I now live. My introduction to photography came when I was a freshman at Washington State University and bought an old box camera for 50 cents at an antique store. That was a life-changing purchase since my passion for the medium of photography soon overwhelmed my career plans to become a physician and I eventually earned a Master of Fine Arts degree. I've never regretted that decision.

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