Wings Of Desire

I’m what you might call a late bloomer when it comes to my creativity. As a kid, when I was around seven or eight years old, a girl down the street and I created a neighborhood newspaper that we made using colored markers. We had a sports section, local news and a lifestyle page. We spent hours every day after school drawing pictures and writing stories. It’s one of my fondest memories of that time period. I loved the ability to take a blank page and make it come to life. Then sports came along and my desire to fit in with the cool kids won out and my art was left behind.

It wouldn’t be until fifteen years later that I picked up a paintbrush and a camera. When I moved to Los Angeles in 1992 to work on movies, I met a Texan named James Brown. He was always creating and learning. He read books, knew all the best movies, painted (his walls adorned with his work), acted and loved to make people laugh. He encouraged me to read, lending me Bukowski’s Women and Kerouac’s On The Road. One day I mentioned that I wanted to learn how to paint. He said; “Gantt there’s nothing to learn. Just have fun…” He set up a canvas on a section of his wall, put a whole bunch of paints and brushes on a little table and told me to go play. That was just the beginning, and soon after I bought a camera and started shooting things that moved me.

I’ve worked hard over the last ten years to expand my creativity, which now includes graphic design, acting, writing and directing. I love telling stories with images and sharing my passion with the world. I appreciate the raw reality of everyday life, the fleeting beauty of those in-between moments, and I do my very best to take every picture with that in mind. I want my viewers to relate to my photographs through recognition of and familiarity with the situations, the emotions, and the energy so much that they wonder if they are looking at a picture of someone they know.