Introduction to book
At the age of seventeen, I walked into the amber glow of Charlie Doran’s photography darkroom to quickly realize that I had passed through a portal of possibilities. The glass and metal box that I pointed at my surroundings was not a mere camera, but a true time machine. It took me to Europe as a soldier photographer. It led me through the lower forty-eight states to catalog our contemporary American culture. This remarkable machine ultimately transformed the way I perceived and represented time. I came to learn that time is transformed, not captured. Pointing a camera at the four-dimensional world and extracting a two-dimensional fragment is by its nature a limited interpretation of what was seen, smelled, felt and heard in that moment.
Early on I was most inspired by the photographers who described everyday life. The wandering observers Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Dianne Arbus, Lee Friedlander and others showed how translating the world into black and white prints could be an engaging and worthwhile endeavor. With camera always at hand, I found my curiosity coalesced around themes: our connection to animals, what toxic communities looked like, the people we randomly pass or encounter, and much more. The seventy-two images presented here are selections from eleven of these portfolios.
The medium certainly has changed during the past fifty years. In 1970 it is estimated that there were ten billion photographs produced and in 2020 that number was over seven trillion (or seven thousand billion!) We’ve gone from the photograph as a discreet object, the print, to the photograph as pixels on a screen. As photography has changed so has my relationship to it. The literal descriptive nature of the medium became too constricting for the ideas and feelings that I sought to express and I expanded my artistic palette to include traditional and nontraditional materials. Nonetheless, to this day photography remains the very best way to describe certain ineffable moments in time.
At the age of seventeen, I walked into the amber glow of Charlie Doran’s photography darkroom to quickly realize that I had passed through a portal of possibilities. The glass and metal box that I pointed at my surroundings was not a mere camera, but a true time machine. It took me to Europe as a soldier photographer. It led me through the lower forty-eight states to catalog our contemporary American culture. This remarkable machine ultimately transformed the way I perceived and represented time. I came to learn that time is transformed, not captured. Pointing a camera at the four-dimensional world and extracting a two-dimensional fragment is by its nature a limited interpretation of what was seen, smelled, felt and heard in that moment.
Early on I was most inspired by the photographers who described everyday life. The wandering observers Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Dianne Arbus, Lee Friedlander and others showed how translating the world into black and white prints could be an engaging and worthwhile endeavor. With camera always at hand, I found my curiosity coalesced around themes: our connection to animals, what toxic communities looked like, the people we randomly pass or encounter, and much more. The seventy-two images presented here are selections from eleven of these portfolios.
The medium certainly has changed during the past fifty years. In 1970 it is estimated that there were ten billion photographs produced and in 2020 that number was over seven trillion (or seven thousand billion!) We’ve gone from the photograph as a discreet object, the print, to the photograph as pixels on a screen. As photography has changed so has my relationship to it. The literal descriptive nature of the medium became too constricting for the ideas and feelings that I sought to express and I expanded my artistic palette to include traditional and nontraditional materials. Nonetheless, to this day photography remains the very best way to describe certain ineffable moments in time.