I have been an abstract painter my entire adult life
but over the last ten years I have also become a serious photographer. I
started shooting pictures in and around an old camp in the mountains
of western Maine, wanting to make art in nature but not to render
landscapes or to depict flora and fauna. I wanted to communicate
what I experienced in nature, in the woods, at night. That kind of
experience and the resulting photographic images can feel like a
flash of memory, a moment held more internally than describable.
People, mostly family, inhabit and escape from the frame of the
camera, but the photographs seem to suggest a human presence, with
or without figures in them. The viewer steps into this space, filling
an absence as if crossing a threshold. Often, during long exposures,
people become ghostlike as their movements are recorded over time.
I am very interested in how we see (or don’t see) what is
right in front of us. The camera can hold more visual information,
especially over time, than we can. It can hold multiple layers
of space and reflections in focus while we can only perceive one
at a time. It can reveal what we can’t see in darkness or burn
images on film over time that we can’t hold onto with
our limited visual memory.
The camera assists me in my obsession with the permutations of the
act of looking.
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