about the artist
David J. Bookbinder was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1951. At age 6, inspired by the launching of Sputnik, he imagined himself a future space scientist. He started photographing in high school where, as yearbook editor, he took most of the candid pictures.
After college, he moved to New York City. There, for several years, he did black-and-white street photography, took pictures of musicians for a book he wrote on American folk music, shot an occasional record album cover, and worked part-time as a photojournalist.
In 2001, after a 20-year hiatus, Bookbinder bought a digital camera and started shooting again. The shift from straight black-and-white, wet-chemistry photography to shooting in color and manipulating images on a computer was literally an eye-opener. Bookbinder still takes pictures of street life, nature, and people, but his current preoccupation is with transforming photographs of flowers, stone, metal, wood, and the sky into mandala-like images.
Bookbinder's early influences included Walker Evans and Diane Arbus. The present work is inspired by the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe, the nature photographs of Andreas Feininger, and the flower images of Harold Feinstein, with whom Bookbinder briefly studied.
Bookbinder lives north of Boston, MA. He works as a psychotherapist, primarily with artists and people with addictive behaviors. He is the author of four non-fiction books and is currently writing a memoir of the aftermath of a near-death experience.
Go to Phototransformations's Studio to find out more.
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