Savoy Cabbage at Union Square Market

NASA Satellite Photo of Anchorage Alaska, February 16, 2003

What do Savoy Cabbage from Union Square Market and a Satellite image from NASA have in common? Benoît Mandelbrot’s mathmatical Fractals.

In the mid 1980s Jonathan Herbert and I were creative partners, owning one of the first IBM XT computers and diving head-first into pretty uncharted territory for photography at the time: computer generated graphics combined with traditional photography. He was the artist and I, the photographer. Although we were far, far from creating anything remotely close to what Mandelbrot had achieved working with the Cray Super Computers of the day (the Cray-2 and X-MP), we aspired to create something, someday that resembled the pages of our hero’s book, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, which, believe it or not, is still in print after 26 years. And, I keep discovering fractals in so much of what I shoot.

A detail of my Romanesco Broccoli from Union Square market- Also called Fractal Broccoli

So, where are we now? Jonathan Herbert has taken to fine art and I, to still life, back to the basics for both of us. The computer still figures in to our lives pretty heavily, but our desires are different.

And I have to admit after 25 years of computers, I can’t imagine living without my iPhone, MacPro tower, my MacBook Pro or my digital watch for that matter. By the way, the 2008 MacPro Tower runs about a thousand times faster than those old Crays.

I would never go back. Now, to sit down to Vicki’s French chicken and cabbage dinner…