A few words

Thanks for stopping by to visit iconometry, the website for my work. Besides teaching, I have a background in both writing and photography. Here is the quick study. I had an uncle who was a newspaper and book writer and an uncle who was a studio photographer, so I had models for both writing and photography. Back then the smallest camera was a 4x5, and there would be a 16x20 for some work. In my photo work, today I feel equally at home with film and digital, but there is something about the discipline of working with film, forcing the photographer to slow down and meditate on each image, studying the light and the people. Mostly I work with medium format film cameras, 6x6 or 6x7, sometimes with a 35mm, 4x5, or panoramic camera.

Over the years, I have worked in studio photography, photo lab work, and photojournalism, contributing to newspapers and magazines. At the same time, articles and reviews have appeared in Christian Century, Christianity & Crisis, Christianity Today, Texas Observer, The T. J. Eckleburg Review, Comment, and other magazines and journals.

Photography is also healing for me. I look for the good in the world and try to understand others. In all of this I seek to be true to the people and places (whether in my photos or writing). My influences have been writers as much as photographers, writers such as Wendell Berry and William Carlos Williams, or the writer-photographer Wright Morris, each who located his work in his community and sought to convey the quiet grace in the lives of those people in the surrounding community.

— Marshall Surratt

To contact me, please use the form below or drop a note to mnsurratt@iconometry.net. Thank you.