Artist’s Statement

As Antonia Porchia wrote: “When the stone is merely a stone, and the clouds are only clouds, I am unconscious.” What I watch for is a certain quality in moments, objects, people or scenes. Lao Tzu referred to “the small, dark light.” But I’m wary of talking too much about this, because its home is in mystery and silence.

I aim to make photographs as though they were taken inside the soul as much as on the street or in the woods, like E.T.A. Hoffman’s tales, in which things prove to be other and more than they may have seemed at first. As a photographer, I’ve been greatly influenced by my earlier years of study, writing, and publication as a poet, as well as by my love for works in other arts. Like Ernst Haas, what I value most in photography is “the poetic element.”
I hope that these photographs manifest the fact that we don’t live among distinct, multiple worlds – a physical world, dream world, political world, spiritual world – but in one, which contains what these words try to name, and still other, inseparable dimensions. In much of my work, I want the photo’s elements to join in making the viewer feel that beyond the room of the seen, there’s a sky expanding beyond the frame, or a further presence, its tail just vanishing beneath the door.