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106 maconmagazine.com | December 2024/January 2025 C u r t i s H e r t w i g INTERVIEWED BY JULIA MORRISON | PHOTOS BY CURTIS HERTWIG and more pictures. Check out his upcoming solo show at Macon Arts Alliance opening in January on First Friday. What brought you to photography? It's always been sort of my creative outlet, rather than a career or something that I'm trying to make money from. Over time, around the early 2000s, I started seeing pictures. I was taking them. I thought, why isn't this being published somewhere? I started to pat myself on the back and appreciate it more and have more fun with it. I'm just doing it for fun. But I have a picture here. This shot, I took in Chongqing, China. In Chongqing, all of life happens out on the sidewalks. So this kid, his family, and all the families are cooking out there, playing games, just sitting in front of their homes. When I took this picture, I was standing in the center aisle of a motorcoach driving through the city. It's pure dumb luck that it came out, but it convinced me to do more. This one is a guy I met at the Domino Park in Little Havana, Miami. His name is Pedro, and he was a captain in the Cuban National Police. Through an interpreter, he was telling me about coming to America. Then, this is a Bhutani rice farmer. He was telling me about how they're being forced to use threshing machines – not automated, but pedal threshing machines. He said they don't work as well as they do using them by hand, but you don't need as many people to produce the same amount of work. You could say that I came to it by trial and error and not knowing when to quit, but how I got started was that I would just go places, took pictures of my travels, and people liked them. If somebody wasn't familiar with your work, what would you tell them about your style? My style is photojournalistic. I don't set things up as I go. Anything you see, I've taken a picture as it was happening. It's like this picture of the kid in Chongqing. It's just kismet. I was either talking or they walked by. I've got a great shot of a guy in Lisbon. He's going to work, walking down the street singing a song or something. He's got his ear buds in, something slung over his shoulder that he's hauling down to the construction site, and he's just in his own little world. To me, that's a great candid shot. "You could s ay that I came to it by trial and error and not knowing when to quit , but how I got star te d was that I would just go places, to ok pictures of my travels, and p e ople like d them." MEET HIM IN THE MAG BEFORE HEADING TO HIS NEW SHOW, OPENING JAN. 3. A r t i s t s p o t l i g h t C urtis Hertwig is a fifth generation Maconite, although he was born in Dalton and moved around a good bit growing up. At 15 he took over his father's Leica Bellows 35mm camera and started shooting with Tri-X Pan. After a while his father wanted his camera back, and bribed Hertwig with an Olympus 35RC rangefinder and a black and white darkroom. Fast forward 50 years and Hertwig is still taking pictures, but with DSLRs and drones, using his laptop as a color darkroom. He has been around the world several times in search of more