Bill Wadman went to music school and when he came to New York he became a freelance art director until his fathers death from Pancreatic cancer. it took six months. his father was sixty and Bill was 30. He decided that this is not what he wanted to be remembered for when he was 60- how much toothpaste he had sold .A disorienting time He wanted to do something to keep himself busy, his mother said he did portraits well, he liked photography and he decided to do a different portrait of a different person each day, It was exhausting but it did keep him busy.
      He knew most of his subjects, he photographed them in New York, Connecticut,L.A. , Las Vegas, even a girl he was dating in London, he rarely had a plan in mind beforehand, It was mostly natural light, but he did it everyday. Food poisoning- no matter- shoot he did, and he put it all on his website. He put a single notice on Craigs list. within a couple of weeks he didn't have to look for subjects, People liked to look at the site on their way to work, He would often put a little caption telling what the subject did or wanted to do. Eventually he had 10,000 to 15,000 hits per day on his site.This went on for 365 days. None of this , of course brought him immediate work, but it did expand his abilities. He learned how to deal with different kinds of people and he learned how to edit his work rapidly.

    He does have an agent now and has been doing portraits for Business week, Le Monde, the Bostonian, POZ and Time. He thinks there is a market out there for more classic portraits, Some of the photographers he admires are Karsh, Annie Leibowitz, Cartier Bresson, and Avedon.You don't have to like everyone you learn from.

    Believe it or not , Bill is making his own  painted backgrounds, picking the colors, mixing the paints and thinners. always the innovative mind, not a bad thing to have in a time of Twitter, Google , Facebook sites  and blogs to blur the mind.

            By Bob Sharpe