Galleries : The world through a wide-angle lens
Alan Brigish is a tidy man. His home, his studio and his personal presence: all tidy.
That personal quality may be the trait that has allowed him to organize a sprawling, panoramic life into a comprehensible whole. His 100,000-image collection of his photographs, for example, includes nearly 250 subjects that are neatly arranged under nine subject headings.
Alan Bernstein and photographer Alan Brigish on a trip to Bhutan in the Himalayas. Photos courtesy of Alan Brigish
Mr. Brigish's attention to detail is a defining element of his photographic style, evident in the thousands of images at brigish.com. His photos have power and clarity, from Vineyard seascapes to a Buddhist monastery clinging to a mountainside in Bhutan, to his specialty - candid and portrait images of Third World people.
In spite of his voluminous collection, Mr. Brigish doesn't totally trust the tool that produces his photos.
"The camera always lies," he says. "I want the image I saw, not the image the camera captured." And to get that image, he uses image-enhancing tools such Adobe Photoshop and its relatives - for clarity, not for fakery. "I know a lot of photographers won't use Photoshop," he says. "I say 'thank God for Photoshop.' It allows me to represent the image I saw."
South African-born, Mr. Brigish, 66, lives with his wife of 44 years, Joyce, in West Tisbury. He was a successful online entrepreneur who poked, prodded, and chivvied the nascent Internet technology for nearly 40 years, well in advance of the service we use today. A former online publishing entrepreneur, he has become a documentary photographer and author, an artist and an incessant traveler.
Life changed irrevocably and unexpectedly for Mr. Brigish on September 11, 2001, when "a moment of clarity" precipitated his dramatic shift from entrepreneur to artist and humanist.
"I booked a business flight on United 93 from Newark to San Francisco for September 11," he begins. "On September 10, I changed my reservation to American Airlines for no reason other than I had a mileage plan with American. That's the only reason," he wasn't on the United flight that crashed in a field outside Shanksville, Penn. Mr. Brigish's American flight on 9/11 was rerouted to St. Louis. He spent the next four days driving a rental car back to New York.
"The world changed," he says. "I remember thinking that my life had changed. I saw people standing by the road waving flags. At gas stations, we, strangers, talked with each other, communicating in situations we normally didn't interact. I began to see the world as it is. I remember getting back to New York. It was raining, the smoking towers lit by lightning flashes. I was exhausted. I thought to myself, 'I was going to die four days ago. Please, just let me get home safely.'"
A photo by Alan Brigish of a charging elephant, blowing dust through his trunk, in the Okavanga Delta, Botswana.
Once he was safely home again, Mr. Brigish resigned from "every business board and association, except for public service jobs." At that point, photographic art emerged as the dominant force in his life.
Mr. Brigish acted on plans to visit Ethiopia with Alan Bernstein, a friend who shares his interests. The two men, who met casually on a business trip and grew to consider themselves brothers, have logged untold miles to exotic destinations together over the past nine years. Their trips include countries like Ethiopia, India, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Bhutan, and Myanmar, and photographic adventures that have allowed them to witness nature at its wildest - and in Mr. Brigish's case, to photograph it.
Artists and entrepreneurs rarely co-exist in the same mind. Entrepreneurs trust they'll know what outcome will result from often long-odds activity, while the nature of art is a dedicated to faith in the right outcome from a process that cannot be prescribed. Mr. Brigish has merged the two ways of thinking.
The photographs he takes on his travels have grown into a website publishing business - hard copy and e-books of Mr. Brigish's photography. He began a foundation that funnels profits from his hard copy books, such as his 2007 book, "Eye Contact: Windows on the Soul of India," into helping the people he photographs, educating Indian and South African children, giving them options to a life of forced labor.
A heightened sense of community since 9/11 has found expression in "Martha's Vineyard - Now & Zen, Community, Traditions & Transformations," a new e-book written by Susan Klein of Oak Bluffs, the nationally regarded award-winning storyteller, and illustrated by Mr. Brigish.
"Breathing in the Buddha: a Journey Through Indochina," is another recent Brigish e-book with new chapters posted on the website every two weeks. "The cost associated with publishing hard copies produces little profit, and less money to help people in deprived societies," he says.
Mr. Brigish's trust in technology is deep-rooted. After earning an electrical engineering degree from Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg in 1964, he left for London where he became marketing vice president for a startup computer company that transmitted information via leased transatlantic cable - essentially private Internets for mostly corporate clients.
"It was the apartheid era in South Africa and I was against apartheid as my father was," Mr. Brigish says. "I knew I had to go elsewhere."
Mr. Brigish worked at online development for 25 years, as a consultant and an in-house entrepreneur for a large media company and his own companies while he and Joyce raised three children, Cyril, 41 (one of Camp Jabberwocky's longest participants), Hal, 39, and Jackie, 35.
This season, Mr. Brigish has curtailed his participation in numerous Island art shows, including the Artisan's Festivals and The Friends of Family Planning Art Show, to focus on finishing his latest e-book project. Readers may see Mr. Brigish's work on the website and at his home studio at 34 South Pond Road in Edgartown.
In all, Mr. Brigish acknowledges he has a good life, complex, interesting - tidy.
For details and information go to brigish.com, 508-696-7424.
Jack Shea is a regular contributor to The Times.
