Photographs
These images evoke the qualities of a portrait, but of a subject other than people.
All of the images place trees, shrubs, and plants within a man-made context. The photographs depict
a complex, observed, optical space—a space where color serves conceptual and narrative purposes.
An artist cannot claim they work with landscape and avoid talking about two important movements: The
Hudson River School
painters and the
New Topographics.
Under the guise of manifest destiny, the Hudson River School painted dynamic and saturated landscapes of scale. This work set the tone for a populist notion of landscape photography. When a person walks into shops selling saturated photos of the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Grand Canyon, they see this legacy. My photographs frame subjects that do not emphasize the grand, and colors that do not deliberately harmonize in a pleasing way.
The New Topographics signaled a different change, a cynical, deadpan perspective on man’s role in the environment.
I do not feel this work needs to add to that cynical view of man, consumption, and environment.
These photos here speak more of nature finding a place within.
The pictures do not try to please and the narrative is not cynical.
The pictures you see here mark an attempt to restart a dialog with fine arts, through photography. It’s a dialog abandoned many years ago, partly out of a youthful disgust of the practicalities of the“Art World,” partly because it requires coming to terms with emotional, philosophical, and aesthetic. The hardest part of putting pictures out there comes from the search to understand, but precisely what uniqueness the artist hopes to explore and develop.
Professionally, I try to make the time people spend on computers suck less. You will not find my work in the high-visibility, seductive, consumer stuff, but in the complex enterprise stuff where working people spend much of thier computer time.
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