Our speaker at the Nov 19 meeting will be large format photographer, D.B. Stovall

Our speaker at the Nov 19 meeting will be large format photographer, D.B. Stovall

D. B. Stovall was born and raised in the Washington, D. C. area. His initial postsecondary education was in photography, and he graduated from RIT in the mid 1970s. Dave worked for almost 10 years as a professional photographer after graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology in the mid-'70s, doing mostly industrial work and graphic design for the Department of Energy in Germantown.

Pursuing his own artistic interests, he took pictures with an old 1960s Calumet, a bellowed, large format, 4- by 5-inch view tripod camera. Stovall's subjects then were the seemingly everyday gas stations, pump houses, barbershops, factories, auto dealers and mills that dotted the cities and small towns he stumbled across on day trips and vacations.

The philosophy behind this body of work could possibly best be described by Lincoln Kirstein, writing in 1938 in Walker Evans' American Photographs, who said that it "can be considered a kind of burrowing eye, a conspirator against time and its hammers...it is 'straight' photography not only in technique but in the rigorous directedness of its way of looking."

Although Dave has a large collection of images made in the 1974-1983 time frame, he started making images again in late 2006 and many of his best were made since that time.

He uses large format, usually 4x5, for complete image control; this large format technique also complements Stovall's vision, as it provides a "slower way of seeing" that is particularly appropriate for these subjects. The medium is primarily color transparency, either Ektachrome E100VS or Fuji Velvia for the large format.