BIO – Peter Peirce
My early fascinations were graphic arts and music, but after a one month college photography course in 1975, my interest suddenly shifted. I left school, got a job in a photo lab, and tried to find freelance photography work. An early assignment was the photographic illustration of parachute packing manuals, (the Paradactyl and the Hornet, to name two) which led to modeling in an advertisement for Wang Computer Corp. in which I jumped out of an airplane dressed as a computer repairman. I was distracted by skydiving for a while, becoming an instructor and earning a Master License, but eventually I sold my skydiving gear to buy a panoramic camera, wandered through Europe and North Africa for five months, then finished my education in photography at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA.
In 1978 I moved to Boston where my first employer, John Marshall, was the photographer I had modeled for as the skydiving repairman. Shortly thereafter I began work at a studio in Watertown, MA, that specialized in photographing weddings, strip acts, and disco bands, and there I shot thirty or so weddings, plus an equal number of disco bands and strippers. Strangely enough, the weddings were the most fun. After a couple years of studio work, freelancing as an assistant, and a brief stint at a Boston television station, I moved to Amherst, MA, and worked as a film/photography technician for the next four years.
Moving to New York City in 1984, I started working part-time as a medical photographer at the Rockefeller University Laboratory of Neurobiology, and an instructor at the New York Institute of Photography. The job at Rockefeller was technically challenging, the problem solving aspect of it appealed to me, and over the next ten years I found myself doing similar work at other research centers. Work in science placed me on the cutting edge of computer imaging just as it was getting interesting, however by 1989, I had realized I didn’t want a career in science. I went through magazines and started asking photographers whose architectural work I liked for assisting jobs. The next five years consisted of freelancing, assisting, working at Rockefeller University, working in the Department of Pharmacology at NYU Medical, taking business classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and studying timber frame construction with Ted Benson. In 1994 I left science altogether, and began my career as a full-time architectural photographer, incorporating my business in Salisbury, CT, in 1997. My corporate address, a 100 year old farmhouse, was renovated from top to bottom over the course of seven years, a project for which I did all the technical drawings and most of the labor. My New York address is one block from Ground Zero.
My goal is to photograph every home, office, factory, hotel, public space, dog house, garden, farm, workshop, etc., in the world, learn to play every musical instrument and every style of music, and have time left over to draw and paint. I also enjoy travel.
Peter Peirce
Salisbury, CT
May 2011