Shoot What You Love ─ Tips and Tales from a Working Photographer

The best professional advice Henry Horenstein ever received was to “shoot what you love.” He’s been doing that for more than four decades, capturing photographs that often richly evoke older cultures and places, especially ones that are disappearing: country musicians in Branson, horse racing at Saratoga Springs, nightlife in Buenos Aires, old highways, everywhere, fais-do-dos in Cajun Louisiana.

Horenstein brings these images together in this rich visual memoir, along with behind-the-scenes stories, insights, and tips and suggestions for making better pictures. His photographs and engaging, often humorous stories chronicle a career that begins in the 1960s, when photography was a trade and even the greatest photographers were not considered to be artists. He amusingly recounts his early assignments. Using his family and friends as subjects for a book on drug abuse was not too much of a stretch, he says, and while shooting Dolly Parton for what would become the Boston Phoenix, the star told him, “Honey, people don’t come out to see me looking like them.” He engagingly recalls his shoots with stars like the Lennon Sisters and Emmylou Harris, as well as his encounters with Ansel Adams, Minor White, Aaron Siskind, Henry Callahan, Nan Goldin, and many other photo legends.

Commanding these pages, though, are the subjects with whom Horenstein has chosen to spend most of his professional career, shooting what he loves. His images of honky-tonk stars, stock car drivers, exotic sea creatures, mixed-race residents of rural Maryland, and Venezuelan baseball players tell what he calls “a good story . . . with humor and a punch line, if possible.”

Henry Horenstein is a professional photographer, author, and educator. He has published more than thirty books, including monographs (Histories, Honky Tonk, Show, Animalia, Close Relations, Racing Days, Humans) as well as several widely used photography textbooks (Black and White Photography, Beyond Basic Photography, Digital Photography). His photographs have been widely collected and exhibited internationally. Henry lives in Boston and is professor of photography at Rhode Island School of Design.