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Bill Coleman: Bill Coleman: A Long Term Photo Project

Bill Coleman is a Nikon Legend Behind the Lens

He says it's not art. It's craft.

"Art is the face of a child," Bill Coleman will tell you. "Anything man does is peanuts."

Bill is not comfortable with the term "art" being applied to his photography. Ask him about his striking compositions and his ability to capture the subtle nuance of a moment, and he'll ask you a question: "Isn't motor drive wonderful?" And then he'll add, "I have a huge number of discards, believe me."

Bill has been photographing Amish families in a secluded valley in Pennsylvania for close to 30 years, and has compiled a body of work that captures the spirit as well as the daily life of his subjects. When he first drove into the valley, he thought it might take a few weeks to photograph the Amish families living there. After a month he was still photographing. Then a year had gone by, and now, almost 30 years, and he still shows up a minimum of three days a week, because, he says, "There's always so much going on."

He says his pictures are the result of "luck and location," that all he need do is stand in the right place at the right time. "I've always felt that there are two kinds of photographers—those who recognize that which was already established beauty, and those who can create beauty." And because he doesn't pose anyone, he doesn't consider himself the creator of a beautiful image. His photography of the Amish, he says, is simply a matter of hanging around and being observant and receptive. "I'm open to absorb whatever I might see," he says.

When he first discovered the valley and the Amish families living there, Bill was an established and successful portrait photographer. "I had a pretty profitable business doing glamour portraits of Penn State sorority girls. I was booked three months in advance, and did about four sittings a day." But part of him was looking for a change. "I was slowly getting burned out making people look beautiful," he has said, "but I didn't go looking for the Amish as a subject. I didn't know anything at all about them. I came across the valley by sheer accident." Soon he realized that what he was seeing and photographing in the Amish community was much more fascinating than the portraiture he was doing.