Essay

Paige S. Wilson, Photographer

Paige S. Wilson recently dropped by Mercury Photo Bureau for a facil­i­ties tour. We traded places behind the cam­era as I made her por­trait, and she made mine. Wilson was in born Los Angeles and raised in Oklahoma City. After tak­ing a pho­tog­ra­phy class at Harding Charter Preparatory High School, she enrolled at the University of Central Oklahoma (UCO),… Read More …

Claude “The Master” Butler

met Claude Butler when he 1st moved to Norman in 1987. He had an arrange­ment with the man­age­ment at Sooner Fashion Mall (now called “Sooner Mall”) in which they let him set up a shoeshine stand rent-free near the mall’s cen­ter court. That arrange­ment ended in 1990 when some cor­po­rate bean-coun­ters got wind of it and… Read More …

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Circle of Confusion (Pt. 3)

I spent the next cou­ple of months obses­sively research­ing Leica cam­eras and lenses. I began by down­load­ing the owner’s man­ual for the M3 rangefinder. Then I prac­ticed com­pos­ing and focus­ing with no film in the camera. […]

I quickly real­ized that the lens that Joe had given me was imprac­ti­cal: the frame lines were too restrictive

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Circle of Confusion (Pt. 2)

… Then Joe took a trip to Roswell. As I men­tioned in Part 1, Joe rides motor­cy­cles: BMWs, Kawasakis, and more recently, a Harley. He’s also inter­ested in UFOs and the Roswell Incident. I think he’s more inter­ested in the char­ac­ters who are drawn to them than to the alleged aliens and space­craft themselves, […]

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Circle of Confusion (Pt. 1)

My best friend Joe Crumley is an inter­est­ing char­ac­ter. He grew up on a farm in west Texas, served his coun­try in Southeast Asia dur­ing a shoot­ing war, stud­ied at the University of Chicago with Aaron Siskind, founded and taught at the pho­tog­ra­phy pro­gram at Florida’s Daytona State College, rode motor­cy­cles from an early age, turned a job making

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