Jose Betancourt, Coloseo
Jose Betancourt and Susan Weil, Sassafras Blue
Jose Betancourt, Vincents Blue
Jose Betancourt and Susan Weil, Bird Tree
Jose Betancourt, Spotlight 3
Jose Betancourt, Spotlight 1
Jose Betancourt, Vatican Columns
Jose Betancourt, Deer and Tomatoes
Jose Betancourt
Jose Betancourt, Cuppa Coffee
I consider music a large influence in my photographic style. Rhythm, time, silence and syncopation are all a part of my work. My studies in jazz improvisation in college along with the study of the documentary genre of modern photography have inspired me to continue a spontaneous style of taking photographs. Photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Andre Kertesz, and Robert Frank contributed to my interest and appealed to my sense for the spontaneous. The results were photographs about how we all relate to our environment both physically and psychologically. This later developed into more complex compositions of the juxtapositions of shapes, objects and people. These more graphic formal photographs became about environment and space which would become part of my half-frame camera panoramas.
The half-frame camera became an instrument that could allow me to establish a scene of consecutive frames to form a panorama. This technique facilitates my interest in the spontaneous happening and attempts to address the notions of time and space. When printing multiple frames, the viewer experiences a familiar scene but after further inspection notices the single images that form the altered panoramic view. This is especially true of the “Half-Seen” series where the locations are different between groups of three or four frames. These examples are more complex for me, the photographer, because there is a certain loss of control due to the in-camera editing.
