I think someone once asked me why I had  to do photography so much, and I always would  reply "… because something in me needs to go out in the world and capture it inside my camera and make some artistic  sense of what can be a confusing, chaotic, and frankly a scary world." And I do have to admit that, at times, my camera was kind of a an adult pacifier, kind of calming me down when things got a little crazy in my life. A photo critic of mine once said I would "freak myself out" just so I could subconsciously manipulate the images I saw in the world. He said I was some sort of Freudian “projector of my subconscious” and  I  was part of a group of artistic creators who "saw the world upside down."

I do admit, I don’t see  the world like most other people do, and at times it can get scary. But the flip side is that I get to see and record creatively what other people miss.

I really don’t like the idea of a "mission statement for my photography," but perhaps it is this (and other people may find some photo wisdom in it) :  I do photography because I have to…because there is a drive in me that makes me curious about the visual world we live in. I do not go out into the world to make “beautiful images".  I believe like Shakespeare that “beauty is truth, and truth beauty”. I hope that the beauty that people see in my photographs comes from the truth that the photos express about the  complex and conflicted world we live in, and like the glass in a lens of the camera that takes the photograph, it has many beautiful facets that illuminate the images they capture.

See more about David Oppenheim and Stockopp.com on his Video :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1r4j9Zlu6M&feature=youtu.be

Italy, 1972