We welcome you to the First ‘In Conversation with Clint Ward & …”

A series of monthly conversations with extremely interesting guests for a comfortable conversation hosted by Clint Ward.

Our First event is with Guest Bill Nash.

After a long and successful career as an electronics technologist and executive in the technology industry, Bill retired and never looked back. He had had enough.

Freed from the constraints of corporate life, Bill turned his attention to his lifelong passion for photography. His photographic journey began at a very early age when his father indoctrinated him to elements of photographic composition and the magic of the camera and darkroom.  In later years and despite an onerous professional life combined with numerous other interests, Bill ran with what he learned from his father and continued to take photographs throughout. His photo bag was with him everywhere he went.

His preference was the black and white medium which allowed him to process films and prints in his home darkroom. He was the only one to see the results of his photographic efforts and he conserved his negatives, thinking he would get to them later. He didn’t know at the time that “later” wound up meaning several decades…

Bill’s preferred subjects were ordinary people doing ordinary things in ordinary settings along with the stories the captured images conveyed. He was and continues to be influenced by the pioneers and masters of the street photography genre such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau, which perhaps explains his affinity for Paris as a backdrop for much of his photographic expression. He was fascinated by their philosophy of intuitive photography and his work reflects his continuous experimentation with the pursuit of the capture of the elusive “decisive moment” that differentiates an exceptional photograph from an ordinary one.

In late 2022 and with no particular objective in mind, he began digitizing some of the thousands of negatives that comprise the body of his lifelong work, and as he tells it, it was like rediscovering long forgotten old friends. Perhaps the time was right to begin curating these photographs and eventually sharing them with a wider audience.  An opportunity came when Lynda Clouette MacKay invited Bill to expose his work at the Hudson Creative Hub. That was the beginning of the “Softly Creeping Visions” project which included the exhibit of 57 photographs along with the launch of a book of the same name comprising 130 photographs. The exhibit opened in early May of 2023 and was very well received, much to Bill’s surprise and relief.

Bill is currently working on Softly Creeping Visions Volume 2 which is planned for launch in early 2024.