About thE artist and AdLIB Design

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Larry Barsh, the person behind AdLIB Design, is a retired dentist whose interest in photography has been ongoing for more than 50 years.

In 1975, he took the Grand Prize in the Boston Globe Photography Contest for hs photograph "Of Countries and Generations. He is a semi-professional photographer who has had photographs published in People, Variety, Star and Rolling Stone Magazines as well as several newspapers. Larry has worked as a stringer for the Boston Globe, on-set photographer for the Catherine Crier Show on Court TV and the Jane Pauley Show on NBC. He also hosted a radio call-in "Ask the Doctor" show in Boston in the late 1990s on WBZ Radio.

Larry now works exclusively with digital cameras and, recently, more and more with the iPhone but has, in the past, used 35 mm, 4x5 view and 2 1/4 square formats developing and processing both color and black and white images.

The art on these pages has been created using a computer and/or an iPad. Larry works with Photoshop on a Mac and various apps on an iPad Pro.  

Works created digitally are poised to become the newest medium for art creation.  It is the oil and watercolor of  today and as such is the medium of the future.

Is art created on a computer using Photoshop (like this one) or on an iPad (like most of the images in the Dreamscapes portfolio) real art?

There is more to photography than replicating what is seen into a faithful reproduction as it was with film photography. Digital photography has opened a new realm of interpretive images combining both photographic reproduction with artistic imagination. Interpretive images are as much "real" photography as pointillism, surrealism, cubism, da-da and the like are real art.

Technology has both simplified and made processing more complex. Photography is art and art is personal - it either affects the viewer emotionally or it does not. Art should not be dependent on a curator's or critic's opinion of what constitutes excellence. It should be, rather, dependent on the how the viewer reacts to a particular image. 

The goal of every artist/photographer should be to have the viewer be able to really SEE your image rather than to just LOOK at your image.As I have progressed on this photographic journey, I've come to believe that the story one is trying to convey to the viewer is more important than technical perfection. The pursuit of pure technical excellence alone often obscures the emotion a photographer/artist is trying to capture and portray. One needs technical proficiency to capture the image and to post-process it, but only enough proficiency to convey meaning of the particular image to the observer.

When an image goes from a simple technically perfect image to one that conveys an emotion or story it becomes art