The Booth only sees what you give it....

We have all(well I say this naively)been inside a beautiful machine with pulled curtain. Whether we have been inebriated on libation or innocently dragged in as a young child, we have been there. We have posed in those few seconds just prior to that flash popping and conducting us to take pose. We have either momentarily stood pause for the digital rendition or the chemical inscription of ourselves onto a strip of 4 individual moments, each an improvised performance with or without the other person who is there. We have all stood outside that curtain waiting for that thin strip of images portraying a the play that took place. We have all lived to regret or cherish those thin strips of performances displaying our improvisations in between calculated pops of light that etch us onto that surface, that surface, more permanent than now. We should take a moment and remember that we have been both the wizard behind the curtain as well as the in awe spectator. What are your memories of this situation. Good? Bad? Somewhere in between? Do you know where it comes from? Does the name Anatol M. Josepho ring any bell? Photobooths are the most destructive technological device ever devised in relation to the "photographer". Eradicating the person behind the camera, while ironically releasing the subject from the gaze of the photographer. This action, or inaction results in a beautiful and unique cultural product that holds a significant amount of fodder for the person that has it. Photo Automatons we are.

“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.”

-Dorthea Lange

In The Begining......there was Light and Mercury and Silver Iodide and Me.

My Name is Kevin Charles Kline: I am a "Photographer" and Instructor of the practice living in Buffalo, NY. I have been photographing since the age of 15 when the boredom of growing up in a small town, a driver's license and a point and shoot camera came together in a symphony of escapism that sent me on a insatiable path that has yet to end. I put the word/title "Photographer" in these convenient "" 's for the simple reason that as I have walked this path of the photographic I find myself taking fewer and fewer actual photographs and find myself more interested and concerned with the conceptual/cultural/social/historical/aesthetic presence of this vast and ubiquitous medium in our history as well as our present. Though we have taken great technological and aesthetic strides over the last 185 or so years of this technology's existence I find our ability to completely understand and digest the impact of all the various heads of this technological hydra has not improved beyond the ghost captured in the box. This Blog will (I hope) provide an outlet not only for my tangential research/interests in photography but will also act as a sounding board to echo my daily inquiries and experiences of the photographic. I hope you enjoy!

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."
Albert Einstein