Statements

General Statement

My work is currently in a state of flux. Change usually is accompanied by both excitement and trepidation, both of which I am experiencing each time I enter my darkroom or sit down at the computer.

For 30 years, I used a variety of film cameras and formats, made gelatin silver prints, and added color to those prints by layering oil paint, pastels and colored pencils. The subject matter of that work is architecture, interiors, and the landscape; the images articulate an intersection of stillness and anticipation.. The panoramic cameras I used most often created a distortion which suggested tension in an otherwise peaceful environment. The lack of people in the majority of these images was an intentional attempt to convey a contemplative silence, for the photographic image to act like a pause in an otherwise chaotic world.

I discontinued printing gelatin silver prints and hand-coloring in 2007. In 2004 I had begun to shoot with a digital point and shoot as well as film, and by2007 found myself shooting only digital. Several series have come from this new work : Chiapas, Museum Studies, This Gesture, This Sky, From the Hancock Building, Meeting Line. Although I have come to enjoy digital technology, I missed the "hands on" experience of processing film and printing in the darkroom.

In 2009 I began making tintypes using a Holga camera. I concentrated first on a series of still-lifes, and on recording hand gestures . In 2010 I also began to make both daguerreotypes and wet-plate collodion positives (ambrotypes) and negatives. I'm interested in combining the 19th century antiquated processes with contemporary digital technology., and am eager to see where these new directions lead.

 

Presence and Absence

I'm drawn to subjects that are beautiful and that lend themselves to metaphor: the grace of a particular hand gesture, a lock of braided hair, a stack of suitcases. In this group of photographs I am looking for ways of directly representing the essential nature of a thing or a person by photographing those meaningful objects and fragments of the human body. In filmmaking 'presence' is the silence recorded at a location when no dialogue is spoken. Presence also refers to proximity, immediacy, and nearness (and, in the case of these photographs, images found or made in my backyard). At the same time, I am also interested in capturing a sense of absence: the vacancy, wanting, or void that is triggered by the absence of a departed parent or a distant friend. Although 'absence' often suggests loss, that's only one of its aspects: I'm also interested in its contradictory ability to engender anticipation. It is this unexpected intersection of stillness (silence) and anticipation that prompted my recent work.

This work employs the 19th century wet-plate collodion process. Invented in 1851, this process produces a negative on glass, from which positive enlargements can be made. The process can also generate an ambrotype or tintype, both positive one-of-a-kind images. In this body of work I have incorporated contemporary technology by scanning the glass negatives and tintypes and making editioned digital prints from the original plates. One of the many reasons I am drawn to this technique is that it requires me to slow down, experiencing both the stillness required by the extended exposure time as well as anticipation for the singular, mysterious images that result.