Photography Offers A New View of St. Charles

St. Charles resident Bill Tayon is an outpatient counselor at CenterPointe Hospital, a job that can be both, "very rewarding and very frustrating," he said.

Tayon describes counseling as an intensely verbal, cognitive effort. To counteract that, he works out at in St. Charles, rides the Katy Trail and takes photographs. 

"Photography gives the other side of my brain a chance to stretch, to focus (so to speak) on the purely nonverbal," he wrote in an email. 

Tayon's landscape photographs are display at  through August in his first professional exhibit. 

Photos on display range from street scenes of downtown St. Charles, to images of Pickle Springs Natural Area in St. Genevieve, to graves in western St. Charles County.

Tayon said in an email that when he shoots, he just looks for something that catches his eye. 

"Sometimes I have a definite scene in mind, if I saw something and didn’t have my camera with me at the time," he said in an email. "Other times, I’ll just try a location–walking along the river trail in Bridgeton, shooting across the river." 

Tayon started taking photos in high school in 1968. It wasn't until the fall of 2009 that he bought a DSLR camera and several lenses. After years of visiting Picasso's, he asked owner Chris Schulte about having an exhibit. 

"If I were to try to sum up my approach to photography, I would say I strive to capture the beatuy that exists in simple scenes," he wrote in an artist's statement.