PHOTOGRAPHS, 1995-2005

For many years I used photography only for casually collecting visual information. My artwork was created in other mediums: etching, handmade paper, drawing, collage construction, and painted wood cutouts.

But after a course with Emmet Gowin at Princeton University I began to take photography more seriously, and discovered a desire to experiment with it, as I had done in other mediums. I responded to a need to trigger a collision of images on film by shooting one image over another, to create a picture that had elements of both. I always made use of chance in order to introduce ambiguity in the photographs.

Over the years I have done many experiments with combinations of motion, blurred imagery, arrangements of drawings under water, in the woods and elsewhere. I hoped to indicate some of the ways in which nature is revealed, as precise but chaotic, abundant but elusive, energetic but fragile, and above all, interconnected.

I used simple 35 mm cameras, and composed in the moment of shooting, with no manipulation afterwards. I printed the photographs in a community darkroom in New York City.