General Statement:

Most of my photography looks in some way at how technology and human culture interact with the natural world. The landscape works look directly at our habitation, while the still life pieces assume a more metaphorical distance.

Each of the online portfolios is accompanied by a fairly brief statement on the work. Below you'll find further information on some series, along with technical details.

Blue Daylight project:

Many of these works were created while I was Artist-In-Residence at Yosemite National Park in 1997 and 1998 in a program supported by Yosemite Renaissance. They record my acts of interacting with the landscape: of looking, exploring, and recording my presence within it. Yosemite is a land of enormous vistas weighted with the history of photography in the American West. While it’s difficult to ignore those big views, I was also interested in the commonplace textures of a more typical tourist experience. In the Yosemite works and in the rest of this ongoing series, my subject matter sometimes explores locations documented by the earliest photographers. Other times it touches on a world they would have had a hard time imagining.

On the technical side, to intensify my dialog with photography's first practitioners, the works in this series employ extreme blue filtration and extended exposures to emulate the response of the wet collodion plates used by the survey photographers. At the same time, I am using modern films and equipment, and the prints now come through digital output, using color profiles I derived from vintage color-shifted albumen prints from 1860s and 1870s Western expeditions. While my working method has some built-in easy ironies and interesting contradictions, my main interests remain in the power of photography to create documents that are both of this day and timeless, a power that can describe with clarity but also create images rich with ambiguity.

Engineered Food series:

The still life works in this series look at the points of contact between human technology and the natural world. Humans can’t exist without food, and many of our first inventions came about to fulfill this need. Through the millennia human ingenuity has introduced fire to cook food, fields to grow it and selective breeding to make wild plant and animal strains better adapted to human wants. Recent developments in genetics now open the door to the creation of trans-genic plants and animals. Reactions to these and other technological advances have ranged from enthrallment to extreme dis-ease, with some reactions turning violent. The Breakfast Cereal Manifesto works look at one such person’s reactions: those of the Unabomber.

Technical details: All images are of ephemeral constructions created by me and then shot with a 4x5 view camera on TMax 100 film. The first prints were made on Agfa gelatin-silver paper, but they're now produced via Epson Ultrachrome printers.

Destructive Testing series:

Similar to my Engineered Food Series, the still life works in this series look are also interested in technology. However, these pieces look at photography's complicity in the endeavor. Without photography, our understanding of the world would be greatly diminished. But the process of photographic documentation is intrusive, occasionally destructive, so that the knowledge comes at a price. Beyond photograpy's technical applications, it's not a far step even to such things as reportage and documentary photography. Destructive Testing takes these ideas and frequently has fun with them, sometimes using dissections of photographic icons like calla lilies or bell peppers to create a new sort of beauty. Other works are less sanguine.

Technical details: Most images are of domestic science experiments created by me and then shot with a 4x5 view camera on TMax 100 film. The Bell Pepper Demolition images, however, were created in the desert using bell peppers from Trader Joe's, frestive low-powered explosives from a New Mexico fireworks stand, a low-output disco party strobe light and a power inverter that I hooked up to my Jeep. Yes, some vegatables were harmed in the creation of this series.

Going:

Speed helps define our modern condition and makes possible a kind of mobility not seen until the most recent couple of centuries.

It's fairly accurate—but also easy—to say that modern transportation has distanced us from the world around us. With that mobility, though, has come a different way of viewing the world. The Going works look at some of these effects, whether it's the blur at which the world passes past the window of a car or jet, the odd stillness that occurs at 30,000 feet in a plane, or the access to vantage points never before available to land-bound creatures.

Generally I'm uncomfortable with photography that aspires to the condition of painting, but many of the images seem to go there. I've been turning off the rationalizing part of my brain and following along intuitively..

Technical details: All the images were shot with a Mamiya 6 camera, handheld, using Fuji Astia film. Lenses used are the 75 and 150mm focal lengths, mostly the 150. The film renders colors quite accurately, and I usually make only minimal corrections in the digital darkroom after scanning the transparencies. I print onto Fuji Crystal Archive photographic paper, using the luster finish for the smallest prints and the matte for prints 18" x 18" and larger.

The Fire Works:

As with my earlier black and white landscape photography, the color images of the Fire Works make use of photography's powers of topographical description. I've used formal, almost static compositional strategies to create images that invite reflection on the scene in front of the lens. Please see the fairly lengthy rant on the page of Fire Works images for a discussion of some of the issues I'd like the viewer to confront in these works.

Technical details: All the images were shot with a tripod-mounted 4 x 5 view camera using Fuji Astia film. I use 90, 150 and 210mm focal length lenses, depending on my needs. As above, the film transparencies are scanned to produce digital output onto matte-finish Fuji Crystal Archive photographic paper, with my goal being to match the image on the transparency fairly exactly.