Are you free next Tuesday night? Well-known photographer & critic Bruce Grant a longtime photoblogger at Flickr & Fotolog, will lead an open Positive Focus critique at Safe-T-Gallery at 111 Front St. in DUMBO, Brooklyn at 7 pm. If you're not a Positive Focus member, this is a chance to come check us out (bring work; we'll critique it if there's time).

Here's a piece I wrote on Bruce's work.

Bruce Grant: Professional Amateur

Bruce Grant’s pictures have an unforced grace that comes very close to feeling casual. You suspect they might be fun to take. His subjects – mostly ordinary objects and patterns encountered on long walks through his native Philadelphia – are familiar to any American urban dweller. But you have not seen doors and air conditioners, signs and telephone poles, walls and chainlink fences like these before.

How can Grant’s pictures hit so hard, yet feel so uncontrived? They avoid odd angles, extreme lenses and eccentric photoshopping, but they’re not uncomplicated. Any artist could profitably analyze the compositions, the way the color is handled or the precise, frequently witty framing. Yet the pictures come across as artless. Like a master sumi-e painter whose swift continuous stroke contains every one of its thousands of predecessors, Grant’s work is informed by more than 30 years of passionate study, teaching and making of photographs. The great photographer/essayist Robert Adams might have been referring to Grant's images when he wrote, “…only pictures that look as if they had been easily made can convincingly suggest that Beauty is commonplace.”