From my hard drive to your walls: Introducing Ramon Trotman Perspective
An introduction to Ramon Trotman Perspective
For a long time, most of my photographs lived on hard drives.
I had spent years making them, walking with a camera and following whatever held my attention. Then I took a break from going out to do street photography every day. A few years passed, and when I returned to the catalog, I could see the work differently.
As I sorted through the photographs, I began to recognize how I had developed as a photographer and an artist. Across different subjects and genres, I could see my attention becoming more deliberate. There was a way of looking that carried through the work, even when the photographs looked very different from one another.
That gave me confidence. I felt proud of what I had made, and ready to share it.
Ramon Trotman Perspective is where I am bringing that work together: street photography, portraits, architecture, still life, and studies of movement and everyday life. It is also the beginning of something I have wanted for these photographs: a life beyond the screen, as artwork people can spend time with in their own spaces.
From Between the Rush.
A reason to walk
Photography became part of my life because I needed a way to relieve the stress of my nine-to-five and the pressures of the world.
In 2015, I was working in technology in Midtown Manhattan. Home was 33 stops away in Gravesend, Brooklyn. Going straight from work to the crowded F train meant carrying the day home with me. I bought a small Sony NEX-5T and started walking before getting on the train.
Three or four evenings a week, I went wherever my attention took me. Sometimes that meant Central Park, Fifth Avenue, or Madison Avenue. I watched people working, talking, and making their way through the same city I was trying to find my place in.
The walks helped me slow down and return home more peacefully. Looking through the camera made me feel more connected to the people around me. That remains important to how I photograph: connection rather than judgment.
I was born in Barbados and moved to America at fourteen. Brooklyn is where I grew into adulthood. The longer version of that story is on my About page. It informs these photographs, but there is room in them for your experience, too.
From dear Brooklyn.
Different subjects, a shared attention
Street photography is a foundation of my work. New York gives me movement and energy, but also small pauses within it. Between the Rush looks at the space people make for themselves amid the city's pressure. dear Brooklyn stays close to neighborhood life and the feeling of a place known through ordinary days.
From City as Signal.
In City as Signal, the city becomes harder to read. Light, reflections, and layers of information interrupt a clear view. There is a relationship between that uncertainty and the way we experience a busy street: we notice fragments, and our attention keeps moving.
People appear differently in Black Excellence. These portraits grew from recognizing qualities I admired in the men already close to me. They are my friends, and the work carries my affection for them alongside questions about the man I hoped to become. Here, the encounter is more direct. We have time to look at someone who is looking back.
From Black Excellence.
A Sense of Scale turns that relationship outward, toward the structures around us. Looking up changes how we experience our own size. The sweep of the Oculus in Wing opens a patch of blue sky between buildings, giving the eye a different route through a familiar city.
Wing, from A Sense of Scale.
Then there is Kicksville, a still-life exploration of sneakers I admire. The pace changes again. Light and arrangement give the shoes something like posture; close attention makes leather, stitching, and soles worth lingering over. Even without a person in the frame, there is a suggestion of presence.
From Kicksville.
These projects give different forms to my curiosity. Bringing them together has helped me appreciate the range of what I have made without needing every photograph to look the same.
Respect for time
Looking back through an archive changes your relationship with time. A photograph brings you into contact with something that has already passed. The scene may have changed. A place you knew may no longer be there. You are able to return to a view that life has moved beyond.
From Long Exposure: City in Duration.
In Long Exposure: City in Duration, movement becomes visible within the photograph. A passing bus stretches across the frame while the street remains. Elsewhere, in After the Passage, an object can suggest the people who use a place, even when no one is in view.
From After the Passage.
What I hope carries through is respect for the human experience, for time, and for moments gone but captured in the artwork. I leave space for what you bring to them: a memory of your own, recognition, or simply a reason to stop and look.
Photographs to live with
Seeing a photograph as a physical print makes it feel more real to me. It feels like a transfer of energy and time: a moment I was present for becoming something another person can hold, place on a wall, and live alongside.
On a wall, a photograph has a place in your day. You can pass it on your way out or return to it when the room is still. I like the possibility of a captured moment becoming part of someone else's everyday surroundings.
From Held at the Edge.
This website gives the photographs a home together. In the posts that follow, I will spend more time with individual projects, discussing the connections between images and sharing some of what brought me to them.
For now, I invite you to explore the work at your own pace. If a photograph stays with you, consider bringing it into your space. The Print Shop is a place to begin, and the project links alongside these photographs lead separately to the full series and available print or magazine options.
A magazine offers another way to spend time with the work, following photographs through a sequence you can hold in your hands. You can view the Kicksville magazine, or explore prints and the magazine from A Sense of Scale.
Thank you for spending some of your time with mine.
Ramon
