Upon receiving his BA in Journalism, Joe Baraban worked for UPI, AP, and was a Black-Star photographer. After that, he ventured out into the freelance world and never looked back. For the past fifty years, Joe has shot for clients from Coca Cola to Hennessy, Cessna to IBM. His resume includes most of the Fortune 500 companies. He has photographed the full line car brochures for Acura, Saturn, and Range Rover, not to mention campaigns for Jaguar, Ford, and Toyota. The tourism departments for Alberta Canada, Pennsylvania, Alabama, and Texas have contacted Joe for their state campaigns. Editorial clients such as National Geographic, Life, Texas Monthly, Time, Geo, and the New York Times magazine have used Joe for several assignments. Joe has also submerged himself in the Fine Art world, and for the past several years, has traveled around the country documenting old windows; a definite departure from the world of graphic design and advertising. Three windows in his series are now in the permanent collection of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas. Teaching people how to develop their eye has always been one of Joe’s passions, and he has conducted one-week workshops at the Maine Media Workshop (thirty-six years), twice at the Julia Dean Workshop, the Texas Photo Workshop, The Pacific Northwest School of Art on Whidbey Island, and the South Florida Workshop. The Santa Fe Workshops have not only brought him there for workshops but has sent him to Cuba five times with a group of photographers on a one-to-one cultural exchange to photograph the light, color, and people of this beautiful country. He also gave a workshop in Toronto, Canada. Joe has also conducted continuing education classes at Rice University in Houston and has taught his workshop at the Houston Center for Photography. He conducts his own “Stretching Your Frame of Mind” workshops all over the world in places such as: Prague, Tuscany, Paris, Provence, Portugal, Sicily, New York, Cuba, and Singapore. Joe has been sought out as a guest speaker for various ASMP chapters (American Society of Magazine Photographers) Advertising and Art director’s clubs across the country, Photography clubs, The Art Center in Pasadena California, and Brooks Institute of Photography. He has given seminars at Photo (Plus) East (the national photographic convention in New York), Photo West in San Francisco, and Viacom, Canada’s National convention. His honors include two gold medals in the New York Art director’s show. Gold medals in the national Addy’s, Photo Design, Studio Magazine’s premier award, the Houston, and Dallas Art Director’s shows, and the Don Belding award in Los Angeles. He is in Texas Monthly’s 100 best photographs and has been on Adweek’s Southwestern All-star Team. Joe has had feature articles written about him in Communication Arts Magazine (plus the cover), Photo Design (plus the cover), Design, Japan’s premier magazine (plus the cover) and Studio Magazine. Joe’s work has appeared in Communication Arts, Graphis, and The Mead Annual Report show. He was also invited to judge the prestigious Communication Art’s Photography Annual. Joe is based in Houston, TX. Artist statement for “Window Dressings” I started my series of windows two years ago, quite by accident. I was driving to Nashville from Houston because my all-natural Bloody Mary mix was included in the gift basket that was to be given to the presenters and award winners at the 2008 Country Music Awards. I had decided to drive to Nashville to take some extra time photographing the countryside. On the return, I drove through a small town in Mississippi looking for any interesting subject matter. As I was leaving town, I noticed an old, deserted building that had an interesting front door. Halfway through my setup, I became bored with the light since the door was in shadow and walked around the side where I saw several old and interesting windows that were in bright sunlight. Father time, aided by the elements, had transformed the windows and the brick wall around them into a cacophony of colors, shapes, and textures. The contrast, from the bright sunny day, had rendered the various hues to a point of being surreal and exaggerated. As is usually the case when I’m taking photographs, I am always searching for a unique angle or height when I’m out shooting. But not this time as there was something that was telling me not to distort the architectural integrity of these amazing windows. I settled on a particular window, and even though it had weathered poorly through the years, there was something almost mystical about it, and I knew I was onto something. Something that would wind up consuming the better part of the next tten years. I finished and was breaking down my equipment when I noticed an old man, whose tattered clothes suggested a homeless person. After watching for some time, he approached me and asked if I would tell him why I was taking a picture of the windows. I said that I found them to be beautiful in their own way, and I wanted to make prints some day. He looked at me then the window, nodded and walked away. I called out to him and asked if he knew what this building use to be. He stopped, turned around and with a mouth filled with very few teeth said, “Sure, it was the bank. It’s where I kept all my money.” With that, he walked away. Now as I travel the state of Texas, “window shopping” as I call it, I always try to imagine what the windows I photograph could tell me if they could speak. I photograph the windows as they exist today and use virtually no help from Photoshop. The majority of structures have long since been abandoned, and I can only wonder who the last person was to look out a particular window, and what they might have seen and thought before they left for good. Several pieces from this series are now included in the permanent photography collection of The Museum of Fine Art in Houston, Texas.