Richard A. Stoner

Henri Cartier-Bresson said his first concern in a photograph is geometry. For me it’s architecture. I arrived at photography after two years as an architecture student. Following an academically inactive additional two years, photography as a newly found creative medium burst upon me at age twenty three. I was propelled by my newly discovered medium and guided by two excellent teachers at Penn State University. Gerald Lang provided the technical foundation that I still rely on and Marc Hessel was the spiritual guide who taught me to see. I was enthralled by the medium of black and white imaging with film, and I dove into the university library. For me these were books of revelations, discovering a rich visual history dating back to Joseph Niepce’s 1827 view from his second floor window. I creatively awoke that summer of 1975. Work consisted of commercial catalog illustration at first, but eventually evolved into specializing in photographing 2-D and 3-D artwork for Pittsburgh regional museums, galleries, and private collections, including the Andy Warhol Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Frick Art and Historical Center, Senator John Heinz History Center, and Westmoreland Museum of American Art. In 1992 I began teaching creative photography at Seton Hill College, now Seton Hill University, in Greensburg, Pennsylvania as a member of the fine arts faculty until retiring in 2018. I assumed the same teaching roll at St Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania in 1999 when the school opened a fine arts department and taught until retiring in 2020. Though digital capture overtook my business photography years ago, I continue to see and print in black and white film for my personal work. I see underpinning all my work, foundational to the image no matter the intent or concept or effect, is a strong architectural sense to the photograph. Though I left the formal study of architecture decades ago, I realize architecture did not leave me. For a photograph to “work” it first has to work as a successful relationship of form, space, and tone within the four-sided rectangle or square. With just such a formal structure, the image is filled with intent, feeling, abstract thought, viewer response, etc.. This is not the only way of making photographs, it’s the way I make photographs.
I love the medium and the language of expression of B/W film and I love the darkroom process as a significant part of realizing in the print the completion of the act and art of seeing.