Cedric Haboush, Photographer

This whole idea of seeing myself as an artist, rather than a craftsman or a technician, is difficult for me.  I come from a family of artists yet I never wanted to be one; what I wanted to be as a child was some kind of scientist or a race car driver.  I loved things with lots of intricate parts – clocks, old televisions and radios, and gasoline engines.  I liked taking them apart and seeing the beauty in the minute details of the parts; the colors of the wires, the engravings in the metal, the myriad of moving components.

When I was 13, I started playing around with one of my father’s cameras.  He bought me my own and found classes for me to learn how to develop film.  I always liked the technical aspects of photography, the mechanics of the camera and working in the darkroom.  In my teens and early twenties I worked in my father’s television commercial production company where I had a great deal of freedom to learn and involve myself in several aspects of the commercial creation process.  I assisted Grips, Gaffers, Sound Mixers, Animators, Producers, Cinematographers, and learned the business from the true bottom up.  At 22, I developed a need to connect with a larger, less familiar world and joined the Navy (Yes, Ours) and enjoyed the challenges, travel, and variety which change affords.  All along the way I kept taking photographs and squirreled them away in boxes where no one would ever see them.

It took me ten years of taking pictures and analyzing my work – looking at light, color, composition, movement, mood - to get to the point where I had the technical skills to recreate the images that I saw in my head.  It’s a gradual, incremental process and lots of people get frustrated because it feels they’re not making any progress.  I can remember the day when it all seemed to come together for me.  I was stationed in the San Francisco Bay area, out shooting photographs.  I wasn’t thinking about film, focal length, or f-stop but about what I was seeing, and everything just lined up.  As Henri Matisse described it, “My whole life has been like this; a moment of despair followed by a happy flash of revelation, which allows me to do something that surpasses my understanding… the price that creators experience when they are only a few steps away from success.”   

I love capturing what I see – things that are amusing, the pattern etched on a circuit board, the joy in the face of a child, the one photograph out of fifty that catches the essence of a person’s being and becomes a portrait.

My goal is to create a body of work that speaks universally to people, that stands on its own.  Too often art – painting, sculpture, writing - needs to be explained to be appreciated.  For me, the pinnacle of being an artist is creating an image that touches something in each of us; that makes us laugh, lets us see a moment of beauty in our everyday lives, or simply evokes a moment that had slipped out of memory.

SA
 

© CEDRIC HABOUSH 2013

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