“Reserved. Mr. Memory” represents the photographs Patrick made over a period of fifty years. In the book he writes: “the oldest of them when I was barely a teenager, the most recent, less than two years ago”. A truly lifetime personal documentary project.

Let’s head to the interview.

How do you live and make your living?

I am retired from full-time jobs. I do some translation and editing.

How did you get into photography?

When I was 11, I took photos with a plastic box camera on family trips.

A neighbor saw the photos and said if I was going to take photos, I should use a real camera. So he gave me an old German rangefinder with a Schneider 50mm f/2 lens and Compur shutter and taught me to develop and print black and white. I took an instant liking to it, and have never stopped making photos.

Photography was never my profession, although in the pre-internet era I had a fair number of photos published in various U.S. and European magazines and newspapers (e.g., Chicago Sun-Times, Time magazine, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, U.S. News & World Report, etc.).

I also did a lot of event photography and the odd wedding. But I always had a “desk job” other than as a photographer. At times when I seemed stuck behind a desk in a boring office bureaucracy, I kicked myself for not having become a ‘real’ photographer, but some of those jobs involved a lot of travel, and I was able to take photos while on business trips.

What do you value most in the art of photography?

That it works wordlessly.

I also like how the practice of photography embodies a paradox about time. The photos in my book were made over a period of literally 50 years, from when I was a kid with my first SLR, until rather recently (for a couple of them, which are digital).

People. Not Pages: Patrick Murphy