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January 2000

Profile: Martin Silverman by Julie Miller

Photographer Martin Silverman began taking photographs "like everyone else," he says, "during family vacations and trips to places like Williamsburg, Virginia, and Niagara Falls with a hand-me-down 127 Brownie that had belonged to my older brother."

However, if he were to go back and shoot those same locations today, it would be from the eye of a much worldlier tourist, one equally inspired by the forms and fine lines of Japanese artists like Tessai and the design genius of architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Silverman, who for the last 10 years has indulged his creative passions in his off-hours as vice president of marketing for Mamiya America Corporation, subscribes to an East-meets-West vision that he calls the "Intuitive Zone System." To borrow from Silverman's current course description at the International Center of Photography (The Intuitive Zone System: A Crash Course), his is a "technical and philosophical approach to harmonizing art and science." Or, if you prefer, call it the perfect balance between the right and left brain.

To visually understand Silverman's "zone" is to examine work like that which he's shot on trips to Italy, where he has participated as a guest in the Tuscany Photo Workshops. These large format images, which include rich sepia-toned landscapes, ancient terra cotta buildings and sculptures, combine both his intuitive nature and extreme attention to detail.

"Many of my photographs evoke the feeling of pen and ink drawings," says Silverman, who has always preferred black-and-white to color imagery. "Minimalist aesthetic and Zen philosophy is an essential part of my work."
The subtlety and precision of Silverman's work has been influenced over the years by his interest and studies in philosophy, poetry, painting, sculpture, music, meditation and nature. "I have a very philosophical point of view that can also be very technically astute," he explains. "My work deals a lot with the tension between people and nature, and the eloquent abstraction of form that challenges the mind to confront reality and intuitive emotion."

Also inspired by the absurdities and surrealism found in the work of photographers like Edward Weston and Clarence John Laughlin, he adds, "The exploration of surrealism through the potentially literal medium of photography is a theme that has fascinated me from an early age and has always been a thread in my work. For me, life is a constant process of introspection, growth and reinvention of the self, and photography has always been a constant expression of my subconscious experience of this world. I guess you could say I've always been interested in the deeper or hidden meaning behind everything."

And while the descriptions may not have been so heady with his earlier Brownie work, the 41-year-old Silverman has always dealt with his photography in a very focused and almost academic way. Silverman grew up a few blocks from the Bronx Zoo and the New York Botanical Garden where he first began shooting a couple of times a week as a young boy. As he's explained in earlier interviews, he printed his photographs in his mother's kitchen, convincing her that it was less expensive to buy an enlarger than to continue sending out the rolls of film he shot each week.

At the Bronx High School of Science, Silverman also began reading photography books and combining history with the technical fundamentals he learned in his physics class. At the same time, he had great luck getting many of his photographs published in several photographic magazines, and received an honorable mention in the Kodak National High School Photo Competition. By the time he was 18, Silverman was already teaching the Zone System at the Wave Hill Center for Environmental Studies along the Hudson River and at the New York Botanical Garden.
After high school, Silverman earned a double major in philosophy of art and media communication from New York University, also earning his way through NYU by shooting public relations and commercial photography assignments. After college, he developed a project for emerging photographers at the Bronx Council on the Arts, and also went to work for Leica in the company's sales and marketing department where he met and worked alongside many well-known documentary and journalistic photographers.

According to Silverman, the experience at Leica as well as the creative environment at Mamiya have only encouraged him to shoot more and expand upon and share his own talent and knowledge. In the 1970s and early 1980s, his work was featured in many solo and group exhibitions. He was a member of the original Soho Photo Gallery in New York City, and wrote a series of articles for Hearst's Lens Magazine. He was also an editor and writer for the Encyclopedia of Photography, published by the ICP, and is right now seeking a publisher for a compilation of his images, appropriately titled "Renaissance." Silverman has taught since 1976, specializing in topics from "the art of perception" to the Zone System. In addition to ICP, Silverman teaches at numerous workshops including the Southampton Master Workshops, the Woodstock Center for Photography, the Santa Fe Photography Workshops, and the Palm Beach Photographic Workshops.

These days, the technique that Silverman is likely to share includes a style he started in Italy, where he used a 135mm or 150mm lens on a 4x5 camera with Polaroid's Sepia Type 56 film, which has a rich sienna brown tonal range. It also allows a range of contrast and tonality by varying exposure and/or development time. The development process uses a monochrome dye to generate print color. With overexposure, creamy whites and light brown hues are produced, while with underexposure the darker tones intensify to a prominent brown/black with terra cotta mid tones tailor-made for the Tuscan landscape.

Silverman's students will also find that, despite the Zone, he is just as likely to instruct them to develop their own personal vision and technique-and even dust off that old Polaroid once in a while. "Technology has seemed to change everyone's focus today," he notes, "and while it's true that we can do so much more with our work today, I think the immediate response you get with a Polaroid is really the essence of the photography. Before digital imaging and scanning became ordinary, Polaroids were like a work of original art that couldn't be altered."

As to whether his own personal vision is changing-or whether Polaroids will be the subject of a future book project-Silverman says he has no plans to either change his style or begin using color film. "It's a rare occurrence when a photographer shoots both black and white and color well," he says. "Black and white has always evoked a much more imaginative and conceptual image for my work, especially when it's completely devoid of people. As my photographs become much more complex and abstract, it becomes about looking at the spaces people occupy rather than the people themselves, and these are often best represented in black and white."

"I'd really like to tackle nature in its purest form, like Ansel Adams," he adds. Until then, I'll paraphrase one of his lines: "If I can add twelve good photos a year to my portfolio , I'd be happy."

Julie Miller is an L.A.-based writer and editor.
Images were taken throughout the Tusany region of Italy from 1996 to 1999 as part of a personal project entitled "Five by Four." All images were taken with a Toyo VX125 or Toyo 4x5 Field camera, 150mm lens, and Polaroid Sepia Type 56 limited manufacture film. An exhibition of these images will be traveling around universities and museums in the U.S. through 2001, in conjunction with a workshop on developing personal photographic vision in light of the digital age. The first venue is Daytona Beach Community College, Visual Arts Gallery in Daytona Florida, which will run through January 2000. For more information on the exhibition / workshop locations and dates, or to order a copy of the exhibition catalog, contact Mr. Silverman at mssphoto@aol.com.