 Untitled: Five Silver gelatin prints, 4x4" each |
| Since 1994 I've been making miniature b&w photographs (image size 3½ x 3½"). There are many thematic lines in the "Studies" project. However a single photograph may embody several different themes at once. I love brief pieces of music and short poems. Their concentration and lucid simplicity inspires me to photograph directly and spontaneously. I think of my miniature photographs as little epiphanies of seeing.
The sets of five photographs, presented in a single frame, can vary in the way the images are linked together. Sometimes the quintets are simple collections of images that share a single or related theme. Sometimes photographs from two (or more) thematic lines are juxtaposed or interwoven within a quintet. Some linkages are surprising, not immediately understandable. They require the viewer to make an intuitive leap into the space between the images where meaning is not sayable. |
 Untitled: Five Silver gelatin prints, 4x4" each |
| The photographs I've been making in the past two years are - in a way - a meditation on the music and ideas of New York composer, Morton Feldman (1926-1987). Feldman often referred to his music as "patterns in a chromatic field." According to writer Mark Swed: "Feldman wrote a music of prismatic beauty ... He set up environments in which sounds beautifully made are allowed to be viewed ... as if suspended in space." In a similar way I isolate and suspend my subjects in a field of black space. In some quintets the linkages form graphic / rhythmic patterns not unlike a musical notation.
Most recently I've been photographing garages, garage doors, boarded garage windows and other architectural details. I love the simplicity of the garage form. Over time garages take on human-like characteristics. Indeed, some photographs in this series are portraits, or character studies. Some photographs are simply documents of a garage's elegant vernacular form. I'm fascinated by the way architectural space can be re-constructed in picture space. Though my darkroom manipulations are not always apparent, some of my photographs are radical visual inventions and transformations. I love the way a garage, when reduced to a miniature image suspended in black space, becomes a self-luminous jewel. |
 Untitled: Five Silver gelatin prints, 4x4" each |