Artist’s Statement

Each series of images was photographed over the course of a single day, using a vintage camera and film that’s no longer being produced. I override the automatic mechanism of the camera, forcing the shutter to stay open and receive the available light; holding the camera against my body to steady it.  In these resulting images of strange yet familiar places, my intent is to chart the passage of time, to blur the boundaries of time and space, light and place, artist and audience.

Yeats wrote, “The blue and the dim and the dark cloths / Of night and light and the half light” — I remember those lines like I was born from them. I’m obsessed with the passing of time and the way light changes. When I’ve done what I set out to accomplish in a photograph, I have preserved the skipping and floating and grinding of time. When it works — when time and light and my ideas align — I can see the tick-tick-tick of life moving, right there in a still image, a collection of moments. I can feel that time again and again and again.

The soft, dream-like familiarity of these perspectives is intended to allow you entry, taking you in as you take in the image — no frame, no boundary to the viewer, no sharp division between what I’ve seen and what you see now. Luminous, numinous, this could be our memory, or a vision out of our future, a message from some other world, absorbing and bouncing its unknowable light.