"Flood Waters, Shepaug at Bee Brook" Washington, Connecticut, 1998

Born in 1949 he grew up in the small town of Roseland, New Jersey, which is located twenty miles west of New York City.

On his attraction to photography, Carl relates: I became interested in photography so early I don't really remember the beginning, but by the time I was ten or eleven I was making pictures with my father's 3.25x4.25 inch Speed Graphic and developing and printing in his darkroom in our basement. For my seventh grade science project I built a sheet film pinhole camera and displayed prints made with it.

There were few university level study opportunities in photography in the 1960's, and in any case I wanted to get a traditional Liberal Arts education. I entered the Humanities Honors Program at Seton Hall University in South Orange, NJ.

After two years there, I received a scholarship for a year of study abroad with the International Honors Program. In this unusual program twenty-eight students from more than a dozen different colleges traveled around the world with three professors for a full academic year.

I was able to work throughout the year on a text and photographs study of "Ritual" as practiced in the places we stayed, and I received academic credit for this project. This was my first opportunity to work full time in photography and resulted in quite a few pictures that I still consider a permanent part of my lifelong body of work. Quite a few have been published over the intervening thirty years.

In 1971 he married Bettina Skor and moved to Philadelphia. Carl worked briefly as a door-to-door children's portrait photographer and then began writing and photographing freelance articles for Today, the Sunday magazine supplement of the Philadelphia Inquirer. he also got photo-illustration assignments from corporate publications at DuPont in nearby Wilmington, Delaware.

In 1975 they moved to rural Connecticut, near the area Bettina grew up, and Carl centered his professional contacts on the NYC market. Corporate assignments for Litton Industries, IBM, General Electric, Uniroyal and others followed.

About this time he began to work with magazines in the "Shelter" and "How-To" fields, which would prove to be an area where he'd do about half of his professional work for the next twenty years. He worked with Popular Mechanics, House Beautiful, Mechanix Illustrated (Home Mechanix), Family Handyman, Practical Homeowner, and others. He enjoyed these assignments because of the incredible variety of problem-solving tasks they presented.

Carl Weese recalls: In the early 1980's I returned to large format in my personal work, first 4x5 and then 8x10. Subjects included the Connecticut rural landscape and also the industrial river valleys which had been prosperous last century but have since fallen on hard times. Much of the urban subject matter was photographed in color and I learned Ektacolor, and then RA, color printing.

Books and other publications always fascinated me as objects, but the traditional methods of graphic design never appealed. All that changed when the Macintosh computer arrived to replace scissors and paste. Around 1990 I began to design and produce, as well as photograph, commercial publications, mainly for organizations in the healthcare industry.

I also began writing on the subject of photography, first for the short-lived publication PhotoPro and then for D&CCT which has since become PHOTO Techniques magazine. I now write frequently for PT and since 1997 have been on the masthead as a Contributing Editor.

In 1998 I was co-author, and sole designer/lllustrator/producer, of the book "The New Platinum Print," an instruction manual in modern approaches to the 19th century platinum printing process.

In recent years I have begun teaching workshops in view camera technique, platinum/palladium printing, and general darkroom technique. I hold private classes at my small facility in Connecticut and travel to workshop centers around the country to give group classes. Currently I'm working on several photographic projects, most involving the use of oversize "banquet cameras" to study rural and urban landscape, with a variety of exhibition and publication goals.

A number of articles for PHOTO Techniques are in the works and a couple of technical book projects are in initial planning stages.

More information on Carl Weese, as well as a wealth of his photographic images can be consulted at http://www.carlweese.com/index.html

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