"Somebody asked me recently about the work I do. I told him it’s a lonely job that pays badly."
Surreal, sublime, Robert "Chip" Simone's images of street life in Atlanta play with a complicated palette. They observe the beautiful and the grotesque, sometimes in a single frame, and create the sense that a wild landscape exists just outside our vision, even in the gray concrete boxes of the city.
"It's about a kind of energy and joyousness that’s found in a large urban environment, the texture, the personalities, the risk, and I don’t just mean the physical risk," said Simone recently as he prepared for his first one-man show at the High Museum.
"Certainly in all the years I've been taking photographs on the street, I've had guns put against my head. I've been threatened with knives. That's not uncommon. On the street, you never know why. You never know what they [the subjects] have been up to."
The other risks are emotional, Simone said, using jazz music as an extended metaphor: "It can be hard to listen to, it involves trust that the music can land you back in some safe place after taking you on a bumpy ride. And you might get a little scraped and beaten."
Some 64 of his images from the last 10 years or so will be on display at the High in an exhibit called "The Resonant Image" that opens Saturday.
For Simone, 65, who has been photographing street life in Atlanta since 1972, the show marks a radical departure. It comes at the same time that a book of his photographs, "CHROMA," has been published by Nazraeli press. While Simone has worked in black and white for most of his career, both the exhibit and the new publication are all in color.
The revolution in digital photography made color as easy to manipulate as black and white, he said, and while he was reluctant to give up his darkroom -- "I moved into digital kicking and screaming" -- he has never looked back.
Simone (the "e" in his name is not silent) grew up in a "tenement" neighborhood in Worcester, Mass., attended the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design and studied under legendary photographer Harry Callahan. In 1973, shortly after moving to Atlanta, he helped found the Nexus Gallery, one of the few regional galleries devoted to photography.
His working method as a street photographer has been to ride his bicycle or walk his dog, bring his camera along and look for the unexpected.
As far as making a living at his art, "I've not done a very good job of that," he said. His wife, Kathy Egan, is a fund-raiser for non-profit organizations and Simone also earns a small income as a certified personal trainer.
But as a photographer, he said, he has no "clients."
"I don’t make pictures for the consumption of others any more than a poet makes poetry for anyone other than themselves," he said. "I found at a certain point that I had to let go of what other people thought about what I did. As long as I was carrying them on my shoulders, they were going to slow me down."
"The Resonant Image: Photographs by Chip Simone,” on view June 18 through November 6, 2011, at the High Museum, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E.; tickets, $11-18; information: 404-733-5000, www.High.org.
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