ARTIST STATEMENT

When I first picked up a camera at age 10, I immediately realized that it was a device for making images, not just for taking them. Although I was limited to film and darkroom techniques in those days, they offered plenty of potential for exploring all sorts of possibilities in regard to development and presentation of the image.  The advent of digital photography has, of course, greatly expanded those possibilities, vastly broadening the scope of photographic expression.

Because expression is what animates me, none of my images is remotely intended to be “a picture of the thing.“ Instead, I take each initial image with the intention and hope that it may provide a suitable framework for the final image I will ultimately produce. That final image often, or even usually, bears little to no resemblance to the initial one. Rather than attempting to represent the thing initially photographed, the initial image serves as a departure point for a process that will lead me to the final image I am seeking: one that will evoke in each viewer their own associations and memories, creating a space in which that viewer and I can have a conversation. And it is precisely that conversation that is the entire point.