“You don’t take a photograph; you make it.” ~Ansel Adams

I have known Bob Roffman for many years. I recall when he bought his first camera and took those first few photos of the forests and falls of North Carolina…and, not long thereafter, fell in love with photography. I have watched Bob, over the ensuing years, become “an artist with a camera.” From his earliest shots of sunrises and sunsets overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains to the many unique and beautiful stills of waterfalls in North Carolina and Tennessee, I have been privileged to observe how he learned not simply to “take a photograph,” but as Ansel Adams said, to “make it.”

Bob’s photography has evolved from simple, yet eye-catching color shots of nature to more complex black-and-white compositions of city streets in the dead of night and old city buildings that beckon like portals to another time, to more modern high rises that stand like great sentinels of glass and steel.

Bob sees his subjects — whether people or waterfalls, rural homesteads or great city halls: He captures their stories, and you feel them, however they speak to you.

Robert Frank said, “When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.” Bob’s photography does that. To me, it is undeniably a form of “visual poetry.” He composes, not with pen and paper, not with words, but with color, with lines, angles, focusing techniques and perspective; with light and dark, with symmetry and patterns…with heart and soul.

As Seth Godin explained, “Art is what we call…the thing an artist does. It’s not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall, or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human. Art is not in the…eye of the beholder. It’s in the soul of the artist.”

Bob Roffman’s photography is definitely art that comes from his soul. It is his creative gift: what he sees through the lens of his camera, and how he sees it. Of what it means to him, so that you can decide what it means to you.

May Bob’s photography inspire you as it has inspired me.
~ Sharon Smith, Writer and Nature Photographer