Because my background is in photojournalism, I maintain a heightened sense of the importance of “the moment.” My work embraces this sense in terms of both intimacy and obscurity, though my focus has shifted from a journalistic stance to something more indirect. Instead of capturing a moment for an editorial narrative, the stories I evoke now are quieter, and I still look for the extraordinary in everyday landscapes, both man-made and not.
My work has taken me all over the world, but my most substantial photographs seem to come from places or environments that I am familiar with, places where I’m removed from the facade and spectacle of beauty enough to interpret these moments in my own way. Ansel Adams has said, “You don’t make a photograph with just a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.” In a time where photographic technology is infinitely accessible, the cognizant eye becomes a rare asset, something to be cultivated.
I’m very interested in the frailty of our perceptions to our environment and the ways in which a slight shifting of light can create an entirely different experience for us. In many of my new landscapes, I try to exploit this delicacy by purposefully toying with the available light to create a tension between the light as it appears in different parts of the scene. Or, I may shoot directly into a light source so that objects become either illuminated or obscured, creating a tangle of forms breaking into something more recognizable. It’s important to me that the light logic of the image still be believable, no matter how surreal. A lot of photographers try to avoid the light source directly in their images, but oftentimes in my photo-journalistic work certain events made this impossible, so I learned to play with it.
Many of my photographs are in black and white, and the images in color generally have a very subdued palette. I love blue skies, but there is an honesty about black and white that emphasizes the formal qualities of the image and allows me to invoke a sense of austerity. I purposefully avoid the figure because I don't see my work as being anecdotal beyond whatever the scene conjures for the viewer. The narrative is in the interaction of form and light— a story that is nonlinear, but honest.