About William Corcoran

Early years.

          Bill’s interest in photography began when he was a child in Long Beach, CA.  His first camera was a Brownie box  which he obtained when he was 7 or 8 years old.  By the time he was 10 or 11, he was developing his own photographs in his father’s home dark room.  As his volume of photographs increased, Bill remembers his father asking him to start mixing his own chemicals because Bill was using more than his allocated share.

           As he was growing up, Bill inherited some great “hand-me-down” cameras from his father that included those made by Leica, Cannon, Hasselblad, and more.  Bill  accumulated an assortment of accessories to go with his many cameras.  All the photos he shot over the next  30 years were black and white because developing them was relatively simple compared to color photographs.  

          During high school, Bill worked at a local photography store owned by the Tuttle family.  By the end of high school, Bill had purchased a large format 4x5 camera which came in handy for work he did while attending the University of California, Berkeley where his he got paid by the University photography department to take pictures of football games and other campus activities.  These photos were often used in the school newspaper and in yearbooks.  He also worked for a private company that was contracted to photograph events at several fraternities; capturing couples on the dance floor, party attendees, and other notable Greek events.

Quiescent years.

           After college, Bill married Annette Kanode and together they and started a printing business which used a large commercial camera to take photos used in advertisements for his business clients.  Bill introduced Annette to the Tuttle family.  Every Sunday they would go out to the Tuttle property in Long Beach to visit.

          During the next 30 years, no matter where they moved, Bill set up a pretty sophisticated photographic dark room for his own personal use.  He liked keeping the photography to himself and says he thought of it as an escape.  Photography  was “a world unto itself.”  He liked the solitude.  There was no financial gain from what he was doing.  He just greatly enjoyed the process.  

          In 1985, Bill decided to sell his collection of cameras and accessories.  Digital photography had just been introduced and he saw it as the  wave of the future.  Bill and Annette moved to Pacific Grove, California.  It was there he began experimenting with early digital photographs on early iphones.  He was facinated by  the medium and loved the fact that his phone was always handily in his pocket.  He “took pictures of anything and everything.”  He enjoyed  talking long walks, wandering, and seeing what caught his eye.  He was no longer limited to finishing off a roll of film before developing the photos he wanted to use.  The capacity of the phone was relatively endless.  It felt freeing to take serendipitous photos.  He began  to think of photography in a different way – a more artistic way.  His earlier experience with cameras through his youth he now saw as a quiescent period which added photography skills and perhaps an eye that noticed things. Those skills  informed his work with digital photography.

Creative Years.

          Over the last ten years, Bill's photography began to take its own shape as he found his own "more artistic" way. There were no particular subject matter categories, all subjects interested him.  This was an exploratory time  for Bill.  No one was judging what he did.  Before the past five years, Bill would ask Annette to critique his work, but from 1988 to 1993, Bill began to push his own boundaries.  He felt free, unconstrained, and uninhibited.

          Today, Bill feels like he is just at the beginning of where he could go with his photography.  Many of the photographs he is working with now are old ones he is looking at again, and is reexamining, remaking, and redoing them with a new eye. Many of the images he is working with now were ones he shot in the 1980s, in the form of old negatives he subsequently scanned; editing and adding  color to his old black and white photos.  Color is an important vehicle for Bill, and a critical element. He uses a printer with a nine-color cartridge.  

          Bill says he has never been a camera tech geek.  He was not interested in typical camera techniques like F-stops and exposure times.  Instead the subjects of his photos were everything.  Although he worked with photography equipment all his life, he never received any formal training.  He learned by doing.  Bill was strongly influenced by the work of Henri Carter-Bresson, Edward Westin, Dorothea Lange and from anthologies, like the Family of Man, edited by Edward Streichen.  Some of his wife’s artistic training has also influenced him.