Dirk Wales says he loves numbers. “I know where I am with numbers. No tricks. Dependable. They never try to fool me.” He also says he hates numbers. “I once fell in love with a woman who loved numbers, money. She thought about it all the time.”
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Wales has only been “seriously making photographs” for four or five years. As a maker of corporate and medical films–and the occasional animated children’s film–Wales has a practiced eye, but his mind “really works in motion.” So he started out slowly, bringing a camera along on filmmaking jaunts and taking still pictures in his free time.
Soon he began to write things down about numbers, “to try to explain to myself what was going on.” On a trip to San Francisco, he’d photographed an 11 he found near a filming site. Later he realized the photograph was the perfect symbol for a past romance.
“You’re always looking at two numbers,” he says. “That’s important, because it’s about numbers, it’s not any one number.” One of the combinations, about hating numbers, won him first prize at the Printer’s Row photography fair this year. He’s also sent several off to London and Santa Fe, hoping to interest gallery owners.
