About f8 Pasadena Salon

In 2007 I founded f8 Pasadena Salon, exploring the aesthetics and art of photography

A salon is a gathering of like-minded people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. Salons consciously follow Horace’s definition of the aims of poetry, “either to please or to educate” (“aut delectare aut prodesse est”).

f8 Pasadena Salon is not a camera club but rather dedicated to the aesthetics and art of photography

In creating f8 Pasadena an easier track would have been to create the next “camera club” complete with lectures about photographic technique, the newest cameras, the newest printing devices and papers and blend into the meetings snapshots, individual criticism, competitions and the like.

But photography is a rapidly changing art…it has academics teaching, researching, providing perspective of the past and at the same time leading the art into its future; driving what the art might look like as the new generation of photographers and technology emerges. Photography will not be held to its little black box ever again.

At the non-academic level, those practicing the art form need to carry on the new conversation of change. The end of this “round table” discourse will never be any final statement regarding what photography is or isn’t but rather a constant re-evaluation of all we held in the past as constant. That’s what f8 Pasadena Salon aspires to be.