Robert Hallock resides in rural western Massachusetts and has been involved with photography for more than forty years.  He works primarily with 6x7 medium format and 4x5 large format cameras.  For the past dozen or so years he has concentrated on black and white.  He is a charter member of and Past President of the Pioneer Valley Photographic Artists.

Bob is an experimental physicist. His field requires meticulous attention to detail and to craft.  He sees close parallels between experimental physics and photography ? in each there are two crucial ingredients: the idea and the technique needed to bring the idea to closure.   Although largely self-taught in photography by reading and experimentation, Bob has taken darkroom workshops of various durations, primarily devoted to technique, with a number of well-known photographers.  Bob continues to do all of his own black and white development and printing utilizing traditional wet-chemistry, which produces gelatin silver photographic prints with a luminosity that appeals to him.  Bob?s subject matter ranges from large-scale landscapes, to smaller-scale studies found naturally, to abstract imagery.  Some of his images, especially those that are more abstract, may, on careful scrutiny, tease the observer to wonder if Bob saw in the image what the observer discovers there.

As a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the Department of Physics, Bob has only limited time for photography.  This potential frustration is tempered by the pleasures of scientific discovery through research in low temperature physics on one hand, and teaching on the other ? with the opportunity to offer each year a course on the fundamental physics of light, image formation and capture, visual perception, and color, ?Seeing the Light?, designed primarily for students interested in Art, Photography or Theatre, but available to any student and taken by students from many other disciplines.   Although he has many physics research publications, the most recent publications that combine physics and photography appeared in the July/August and September/October 2006 issue of View Camera magazine.

He can be contacted at hallock@physics.umass.edu.  An entry web page to examples of his work can be found here:  http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~rbhome/draftmain.htm  or at http://www.rbhallock.com/, which for the moment leads to his University site.