Artist's Statement: Nature Photographs

Towering mountains are glorious, but just as glorious to me are the patterns made by water dripping down the face of a rock, by lichen growing on a rock, and even the patterns within the very rock, put there by the amazing processes through which rock is created. When I am outdoors my eye is drawn to these subtle details of nature and photography is my way of recording what I have seen so that I can see it over and over again and pass it on to others.

The largest project I undertook as part of my Master of Fine Arts in ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art was a sculpture installation in and over a stream on the grounds of the Academy. The installation was designed to reveal and celebrate the natural geological processes operating within the stream. It also drew attention to a neglected stream and bit of woods, both of which were only rarely noticed by most people. I have carried these same ideas over to my photography. I especially like photographs that reveal subtle details of nature and of natural processes that might easily be overlooked. Like a geologist, when I am looking for photographs I seek to find, within the complex jumble of nature, isolated pieces of information that tell me a larger story.

I use a variety of cameras to make my nature photographs, but my two favorite cameras are a Hasselblad 503CW medium format camera and a Nikon F3 35mm camera.

Artist's Statement: Silhouette Series

I think of this work as "static dance." This is a bit of an oxymoron since movement is a central element of dance, but what photography can do that dance cannot is freeze a moment in time and allow us to contemplate it. I love the expressive potential of movement in dance, but I also love slowing things down and thinking about the expressive potential of a single position. Since I am most interested in the overall form created by the human body, I make silhouettes, with just a little detail inside the outline to provide a sense of depth and enhance the form.

Like the ancient Greeks, I see the male body as beautiful in its own right, but in my photographs I try to move beyond a simple celebration of the body and capture a sense of emotion in my images. Life, for me, is often rather mysterious and even puzzling at times. At one moment, struggle might mingle with hope and a touch of sadness to create a complex mix of feelings, and an hour later everything might have changed. This is what makes life rich, but also what makes it challenging. I hope my photographs capture at least a little of this richness and challenge.

I primarily use myself as the model because an important part of my process is exploring the positions I can take on with my own body. I am the dancer in an improvisational dance, rather than just an observer providing feedback to a model and occasionally snapping the shutter.

The camera I used for making these photographs is a Hasselblad 503CW medium format camera, loaded with traditional black and white print film. Since I cannot trigger the shutter directly when I am in the picture, I fabricated a mechanism that allows me to trigger a timer connected to the camera's shutter, once I am in position in front of the camera.