Introducing Photographer John Corney

As I start to write this, I struggle over whether I should use the first or the third person, the reason being that I am the owner and webmaster for ArikiArt.com.

I started building this website at the end of 2002 as a way of promoting the art of my friend Raymond Neher who was in the early days of his struggle with lung cancer. For the last four years, ArikiArt has never been about me as I gave thousands upon thousands of hours for free to my artist friends that are represented here.

Over those 4 years I have however often thought about putting some of my photography on ArikiArt. Although I have no formal training in photography, I am a serious enthusiast, and have always loved photography since I was a kid. In fact, I can pinpoint the exact time that my passion began, which was when I was 9 years old and went on a school trip during the spring vacation and my Dad gave me his "box brownie" camera to take along with me. (To be exact, the camera was a Kodak 'Six-20 Brownie C' roll film box camera, c.1948. These cameras were to the history of popular photography what the Model T Ford was to the history of the automobile, with their low-cost and wide availability placing photography firmly into the hands of the masses.)

What the "Box Brownie" did for photography in the 1950's, the digital camera has taken to the nth degree in the 21st Century. Everyone is a photography enthusiast these days, and computing power, image software, and the internet has enabled all these newly-minted hobbyists to publish their art form cheaply and widely for all to see.

I am apprehensive to go public and have no intention of telling any of my friends or family or the ArikiArt artists, least of all ArikiArt photographer Michael McLane, that I have published some of my photographs here! Perhaps they will stumble upon them one day. I guess it will be a test to see how deeply they surf the pages of ArikiArt. So it's a secret endeavor to be discovered by those that alight here courtesy of the internet search engines such as Google, and Yahoo, and MSN - the cruel beasts to whom I have sold my soul as a webmaster these past 4 years.

I feel I do know a little about the art of photography, but am very conscious of how much there is to learn, how much I don't know, and the deep gulf there is between all the weekend and vacation snap-shooters and the true artist. I wonder that I am just one of the weekend masses, not remarkable in any way. I do not consider myself an artist with the camera by any means yet, but have a passion to get there, and believe that over the 40 years since I first shot that Box Brownie I have at least learned something about photographic technique and composition. One thing I do know for sure as I have photographed the artworks of the ArikiArt artists and prepared these images for arikiart.com is how much I love "the image" and "color" and working with them with Photoshop. And I know that the most bitter pain of my life was to lose in transit between Japan and the United States the 4-years worth of photographs that I took while living in Japan in the early 1990s.

Friends say that I'm a good photographer, but so are so many more people, the masses of them I see with their Canons, Nikons, and Pentaxes on the trail with me. I hope one day I might feel I deserve the title of "photographer" that I gave myself in the title of this page, something I did awkwardly only because there seemed no way around it. So I invite you to be a companion on my journey if you dare and if you are so generous to travel with me. I allow you and ask you to be the judge over time of my art form, and hopefully one day you will call me "a photographer".

So, let's begin! Here I bare my soul!

John Corney