Artist Statement:
Neuroscientists tell us that our individual experience of life is an elaborate hallucination. Our brain constructs this hallucination for us from the simple electrical and chemical impulses that cascade into our brain from our senses. My photographs capture my own hallucinations.
I revel in disorienting the viewer by challenging comfortable ways of viewing a photograph. I move the viewer away from seeking, identifying and dismissing the photograph once they find the subject. I create this abstract expression through precision cropping, a palette of blur, shapes, lines, and color.
I seek to move the observer beyond a subject and into appreciating the sensation; the feeling of the photograph.
About me and my work:
I am an art photographer based primarily in Denver, Colorado. I've been a photographer for over 50 years, though admittedly with varying levels of activity.
I'm interested in the challenges of appealing to the viewer's visual cortex, not their pre-frontal cortex: vision, not logic. Call it visual brain candy if you will. To do that, I seek to confound the viewer's searches for a subject in my photographs. I do this through the use of reflections, perspectives, geometric shapes, long exposures and precision cropping to remove familiar visual anchors.
Keeping the subjects of my photographs unknown allows appreciation of the final work without getting bogged down in subject orientation. Despite questions, I don't reveal any details about the subject of a photograph other than the approximate location.
I seek disorienting the observer by providing a unique viewing experience; a vision, often without a subject; a hallucination. I fine tune the images I capture to match my personal vision. I don't arrange the items in my images. I photograph, unaltered, what I see as I walk around.
I like to turn the mundane of the everyday into art suitable for contemplation, display or decoration. I do a minimal amount of post-processing with mostly basic, image-wide controls. I don't do image manipulation like multiple images, multiple exposures or Photoshop work. I usually use only the most basic controls in Lightroom. The images are directly from the camera. There are hidden elements and geometric shapes in my images.
I use a square crop for most of my photographs as a way of preventing the observer from simply scanning photographs to locate the subject so they can dismiss it and move on. By using a square format, it forces the observer to pause a moment and search the frame. The contents of a square photograph seem to float. This supports my vision.