David J. Bookbinder was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1951. Though he has taken pictures since he was a boy, he started serious pursuit of photography in high school where, as yearbook editor, he shot most of the candids. After college, he moved to New York City. There, for several years, he did black and white street photography, took pictures of musicians for a book he wrote on American folk music, shot an occasional record album cover, and worked part time as a photojournalist. He spent five years carrying two cameras everywhere and often wished to have a camera attached to his forehead, like a third eye he could actuate with his mind. When he left New York in 1979, he left his darkroom — and photography — behind.
In 2001, after a 22 year hiatus, David bought a digital camera and started shooting again. The shift from straight black and white, wet chemistry photography to shooting in color and manipulating images on a computer was literally an eye opener.
David still takes pictures of street life, nature, and people, but his current preoccupation is with transforming photographs of flowers and other objects into mandala like images. David's early influences included Walker Evans and Diane Arbus. The present work is inspired by the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe, the nature photographs of Andreas Feininger, and the flower images of Harold Feinstein, with whom David briefly studied.
