Thomas Hawk

The best photographs in the world have yet to be taken. My statement as an artist is to outdo New York’s Little Angel Angelo Rizzuto, who between 1952 and 1966 documented New York City with over 60,000 photos. We all have but a short time on this earth. As slow as time can be it is also fast and swift and mighty and then it’s over. I have advantages over Rizzuto at present. I get to shoot digital, I’m starting younger than he did and hopefully I’ll live beyond 61. The absurdity of my obsessive compulsive statement is not lost on me of course. But it is the absurdity of life that I find most beautiful of all. Where Sisyphus had his stone I have my Canon 5D and a bag full of lenses. Document, explore, lather, rinse, repeat. Photography for me then becomes a kind of hyperactive life documentary, loosely arranged and presented. My work is less about individual images and instead more about the power of a massive amount of excessive and disjointed images -- a mighty rush of water, where stories, characters and places sometimes stay and other times reappear or disappear entirely for no good reason at all. At present my stories are mostly familiar tales of San Francisco and the people who live there, with an occasional jaunt off to some other interesting place in the world. I regularly shoot as a freelancer for San Francisco Magazine and have had my work published in numerous places from the BBC to JPG Magazine. Recently Robert Scoble and I did a video shoot of my photography, the first episode of which can be seen here. All of my images are Creative Commons licensed, non commercial with attribution. If you'd like to use any of them for non commercial or personal purposes feel free. I am also the Chief Evangelist for Zooomr.