Chuck Staley

When I was a teenager growing up in the South, a person who fed his family by taking pictures was a photographer and a person who painted pictures was an artist. I never wanted to be a photographer and I wasn’t about to work in my dad’s funeral home when I finished school – I wanted to be an artist.
But my parents informed me that photographers stood a chance of bringing home a weekly paycheck while most artists starved to death, so I got into television broadcasting instead. I became a cameraman and then a director. Those people weren’t called artists back then, and you never heard about “hungry cameramen” or “starving directors,” so it appeased my folks, especially since I insisted that I wasn’t going to “bury old dead people for a living.”
It has been only a short time since photography became acknowledged as an art form. I think it happened about the time snowboarding became an Olympic sport, I’m not really sure. What I do know is that it took a hell of a long time for the terminology to change and the technology to catch up with the artist that was hiding within me.
What I now see is, while I have been known as an artist for only two years now, my art career really started over half a century ago, because that’s when I took many of the pictures that now hang on the gallery walls as artwork. So I guess I have been an artist for most of my life – I just didn’t know it.
Sorry, Mom and Dad…
If you like my work and would like to stay informed, I would love to hear from you. And thanks for dropping by…
This antique train was in a museum in Karlsruhe, Germany.
During WWII the building was bombed, exposing the treasure.
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