Introducing David Benjamin Sherry as featured in I don’t really know what kind of girl I am. curated by Jody Quon.
 
 

 
DAVID BENJAMIN SHERRY creates color-washed bucolic landscapes that look like paintings rather than photographs. There is an idyllic freedom infused in his pictures of the West Coast countryside or Adam and Eve-like nudes. They are fun, they are sexual, they are pretty. More simply put, they have personality.
 
New York Photo Festival: What is your approach to photography?
My approach to photography is always changing. Sometimes I’m like a filmmaker, sometimes a documentarian, sometimes a poet, sometimes a sculptor, sometimes a painter, and it always involves musical interpretation. I find myself photographing close friends, lovers, national parks, myself, mysterious lights and abstractions in nature and in the human form. I use multiple cameras and always print in the darkroom. I’m a romantic of the past when it comes to many art forms and prefer craft over perfection when it comes to photography. I enjoy mistakes and light leaks, dust and broken cameras. I embrace the elements when I venture into the wilderness and have broken all of my cameras from high winds and rain, freezing cold and extreme high heat. I like to push the boundaries in photography and see new things in the darkroom and behind the lens. I like to make things up as I go and work in environments rather than against them. I don’t like computer-generated photography and will not embrace it. That’s how I get off in photography, by traveling and experiencing life to the fullest and capturing it on film, rather than sitting at computer.
 
What do you like to photograph?
I like to photograph things that turn me on and keep my interest. People that I believe are magical thinkers and creatures. Landscapes that take me over and leave me speechless and in awe of our great American wild. I love to explore. I travel through big cities and alone in nature, to people’s homes and on the streets. In supermarkets and European cities, nightclubs and bedrooms. I like to photograph what I see in my imagination and what I see before me.
 
Is there one person, place, or thing that continually catches your eye?
No, there’s too many things that catch my eye. My attention span is completely shot and I can’t ever focus on one thing for too long. I am usually drawn to a few re-occurring things that I’ve written extensively about, hence remembering them on a daily basis….spectacular light shows, handsome men, German techno, natural wonders, desert foxes, blue eyes, bright colors, old books, record covers, plants and phallic cactuses, overgrown parks in cities, Berlin, old photographs, the great American West. I could go on and on.
 
What do you aim to achieve with your work?
I hope to achieve many things with my photographs. Most important is to enlighten others with my vision. To enchant people with spectacular views from another world. To blur the lines of reality and ask people to lose themselves and give up their desires and feel anything and everything all at once. To spend time alone in this world and celebrate what you feel and see. I would hope others can take something away from seeing my pictures and act on their own desires rather than feeling sheltered or scared to do something they’ve thought or dreamed of doing. Live it out, and push that sometimes bittersweet thought of not dreaming it, but being it.
 
—Tami Mnoian