I am an American writer and photographer living in Vienna, Austria. I created the things you can see and read on this site.
My father was an amateur photographer, and he gave us boys a Kodak Instamatic. When I was in high school, I took a class in 35mm photography, and the first real photographs I saw were those of the Swiss-American Robert Frank. I also began going to the public library and looking at big stacks of photography books and monographs. Eventually, I studied documentary photography at the University of Texas, with several teachers, including Dennis Darling and Ellen Wallenstein.
I learned a lot from them, and from Frank, Danny Lyon, Larry Clark, Lee Friedlander, Man Ray, Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark, Moholy-Nagy, Josef Koudelka and Andre Kertesz. I began working as a magazine journalist in 1987, after I moved to New York City. Over the years, my photographs have appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and Chemical Imbalance, as well in a few very nice album sleeves and CD booklets.
Since moving to Vienna in 2005, I have worked as an editor, proofreader, teacher and NGO manager, but I continue making photographs and occasionally writing for publication, most notably for the Sueddeutsche Zeitung (Munich.) I don’t shoot black and white film anymore, but I still like the way it looks. I’m not entirely sure what to think of the color photographs I’ve made in Vienna, on the streets and in the trains. But I like them.
“Straight and slightly dirty” is the best description of my pictures that I can come up with at the moment. I hope you enjoy what you see here. If you do (or don’t), or if you see yourself in one of my pictures, please contact me at info@patblashill.org