By Edmund R. Schubert

“I’m not interested in shooting new things.

I’m interested to see things new.”

~~ renowned photographer Ernst Haas

Growing up as a kid in the ‘70s and ‘80s on Long Island, I was a huge baseball fan. And as oxymoronic as it sounds, the only thing I loved more than baseball was a rained-out NY Yankees game. When the Yankees rained out, the station that broadcast their home games would instead show reruns of the original Twilight Zone.

How I loved—and still love—those old episodes. “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” is a parable that, if anything, holds more true today than when it first aired in 1960. Some episodes were admittedly silly, but at its best, The Twilight Zone shook our everyday world and bent in ways that forced you to reconsider things you previously took for granted.

The Twilight Zone was one of my greatest influences and its recurring theme of moments that are close enough to real life to be familiar, yet different enough to make you pause, has shaped nearly every creative outlet I’ve undertaken. It’s obvious in much of my writing. I see it in my decades-long fascination with bonsai trees. And it has, almost inevitably, manifested in my photography.

The easy, obvious photographic examples of familiar-yet-different are found in my infrared images, multiple exposures, and long exposures. But black and white photography is more different from color that one might first imagine, and even standard color photography can create the effect. The simple act of getting the camera low to the ground can produce a perspective that most people never consider. Pictures taken in the reflection of broken glass or puddles fascinate me to no end. I’ll stand for half an hour in front of a cracked window looking for the perfect angle, the best place to situate the elements reflected in the image, the ideal way to use the crack in the glass to create a crack in our view of.. well, everything.

And that, I believe, is what makes good writing and good photography. It says in the Bible, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” Two thousand years later that hasn’t changed. The task then is to help people see the  world—the world they’ve always lived in—in ways they haven’t yet conceived of. That’s the direction I always seem to find myself heading in anyway, and as the great philosopher/comedian George Carlin once said, “An artist has an obligation to be enroute, to be going somewhere.”