THE CURIOUS CASE OF PHOTOGRAPHER DAVID A. BROWN

When I walked into Catalina Coffee to meet David A. Brown on a Monday in January, I couldn’t reconcile the fact that the guy staring right at me was the same bespectacled man I’d seen in pictures. With a gruff beard and a studded black hoodie, David looked more like an out-of-place snowboarder than the former director of a nonprofit organization. Perhaps the fact that he recently relinquished the latter title had something to do with the youthful transformation. After he revealed to me he was having new glasses made because his vision had suddenly improved, I began to wonder if this was a curious case of Benjamin Button.

As founder of Spacetaker, Dab (as he likes to be called) helped artists grow their business and created the go-to website for Houston’s art community. Last December, he ceremoniously handed over his Managing Director job, naming Jenni Rebecca Stephenson as his successor. “It’s akin to sending your kid to college after you’ve done everything you can,” he says of leaving the project he spearheaded for eight years. Now, it’s all about his wife, kids and dabfoto creative, a consulting and photography business.

Dab is hitting the ground running. Sore from completing 13 miles in the Houston Half Marathon a day earlier, Dab told me about his upcoming show, “Trying to find my Way.”

What’s the show about? We are confronted with so much information every day, how do we make decisions? How do we navigate? It turns out much of our decision-making is governed by thousands of years of evolution. It’s pretty much all biological. Even intuition is biological. I spoke with neuroscientists while researching this project.  On March 20, David Eagleman will be lecturing at the show about perception. (Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine and author of the New York Times bestseller Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.)

Describe the photography. My images look completely fake. They look like some Photoshop monkey went to town. But they are single exposure and untouched. They are deconstructed still-lifes. I came across lenticular printing. I got the idea from a Spider-man greeting card my son had. You know when Spider-man looks like he’s swinging on a string when you move the card? It’s like 3-D. I had the images printed in China.
It was the only vendor I found who would make single prints. Even my usual, local printer, Bob at Que Imaging, agreed this was the way to go, despite the fact that it cost him some business!  I even got a panel together before I made the decision. They all agreed the effect was beyond gimmicky.

How did you achieve the layers of light in your images? I compressed three to ten layers of light, using glass, windows and reflections. I carefully lined them up, like this tree that looks like it’s on top of a dresser. The camera I used is a Sigma DP1, which has an image-sensor that kind of mimics film and produces great colors. It looks kind of like a Coolpix but the Darth Vader version. Ouch! (As he gets up from his chair so we can go check out the prints at his Winter Street studio.)
Maybe you need to stretch, Benj – I mean Dab?
Oh, I did. It’s just the lactic acid, you know?

Favorite restaurant: Divino
Favorite book: The Tao Te Ching  by Lao Tzu
Favorite thing to do on a Sunday: family breakfast at my dad’s house and an adventure with the kids
Weekday uniform: jeans, tee-shirt and work boots
Advice to an artist: diversify your income and work hard at your practice
Hobbies: running, spending time at the Menil Collection, reading
Person you would like to meet (dead or alive): Lao Tzu or Chuang Tzu
Interview by Nadia Michel | Main portrait by Kennon Evett
FOR ART’S SAKE | march 2010
002 Magazine