A Boston native and a current resident of Somerville MA, David Strasburger is a physics teacher at Noble and Greenough School, an independent school in Dedham MA. Largely self-taught, Strasburger continues to learn photographic craft from friends and colleagues along the way. A graduate of Oberlin College, he has attended Maine Photographic Workshops and been schooled in alternative processes with noted experts Christopher James and Pradip Malde. After building a darkroom on a sabbatical, he drove across the country photographing what he thought of as “domestic landscapes,” looking for “the geometry of intimacy and the anatomy of inhabited space.”

Featured online will be a selection from this ongoing series titled “Analemma”—an astronomical and mathematical term which represents the earth’s relationship to the sun as an elongated and asymmetrical figure eight—printed delicately in the handmade processes of kallitype and platinum/palladium. Often framing a view or a spatial or emotional expanse, Strasburger’s panoramic diptychs and triptychs are his way of attempting to answer or pose questions he cannot address in any other way than by taking a photograph.

- Leslie K. Brown, PRC Curator

Click here for Strasburger's website

ARTIST STATEMENT

These images are part of an ongoing project in which I explore interior personal landscape by observing external geometry. Many of my photographs function as questions, as attempts at understanding, as opportunities for me to think about a problem over time.

Growing up, my family was intensely verbal. Anything important was explored, communicated and understood through words. Mingled with the cookbooks on the kitchen shelf were dictionaries, an atlas, an encyclopedia, all there so we wouldn't have to run to the living room to settle one of our routine dinner table arguments. If my upbringing was intensely verbal and figurative then my academic training, in physics, was intensely quantitative and formal. But there are questions and ideas that don't yield well either to words or numbers. And that's why I make photographs.

Primarily, I photograph people that I care about. I am interested in the ways that over time we grow closer and farther apart, we intertwine in tight spirals or wander off on broad arcs.

To some extent the photos spring from a documentary impulse, but there is an element of fiction in every frame. I believe that in memoir sometimes you have to make things up to get at the truth.

Click on each image for larger version and caption.