My landscape and street photography focuses on the visual imprint of human activities—consumption, creativity, leisure, travel, and remembrance—on the built environment.  Over the last few years I have taken numerous day trips, exploring the signs and storefronts, monuments and sculptures, buildings and roads of New York City and the Hudson Valley.  With the pandemic waning, I am increasingly visiting people-intensive venues, such as county fairs, amusement parks, zoos, aquariums, and the streets of Manhattan.  As an analytical person, I am excited by the challenge of creating photographs where color is not merely descriptive but artistically essential.

————————————————————

Joe Williams has always been interested in the arts.  After receiving an SLR for high school graduation, he photographed many typical campus subjects as a yearbook photographer at Harvard, from sports to student events to demonstrations, working in black-and-white film photography with 35mm, medium-format and large-format cameras and spending countless hours in the darkroom.   

​

Joe gained a broader perspective on the medium's artistic possibilities in senior-year classes with two renowned photographers, William Eggleston and Tod Papageorge, whose assignments to the streets of Cambridge and Boston nurtured his natural affinity for landscape photography.  Those classes further shaped his artistic perspective by leading to opportunities to meet and talk with Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Stephen Shore, Lewis Baltz, and other contemporary photographers, and to study the work of a wide range of historic and modern photographers, among them Atget, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Joel Meyerowitz, and Bill Christenberry.

​

As Joe pursued careers in news and finance after college, he continued to work in film and photographed diverse subjects on an intermittent basis, like the West Village, the Queens landscape, New Year's Eve in Times Square, and West Virginia coal country.  Ultimately, Eggleston’s influence inspired his shift to color, a transition facilitated by digital cameras.