Artist Statement

I learned photography through a variety of approaches and teachers. One, photography as a conceptual art form, with a clear about-ness of the image. The other is from a more traditionally modernist approach. As it is, and for the most part, my work in photography has something of both. While I have a deep appreciation for a beautiful formal photograph, I must ask the question I teach my students to ask; What is the photograph about? I am inquisitive about the other story, however fleeting a moment it reveals, and how it relates to photography’s visual soundness, as photography’s relationship to truth is constantly changing. I am interested in what happens visually, psychologically, and emotionally. When I alter a photograph, I am asking the question about how to re-represent, re-think, re-contextualize the original image.
I use the female figure to represent a female way bigger than me. Over many years, the alterations I make in my photos are in varying stages of the process: during exposures at night with camera movement or subject blur, after the print is made with added selective color, using appropriated text & image, collage, and digitally montaged images in a composition. What begins as an intuitive process of scenes or figures are, unsurprisingly, parts of my life.

Blog

Pavement Photos

06/25/2020

A few years ago, I decided to leave North Carolina and move back to New York. Weeks after I got there, my mother slipped on the pavement outside of her apartment getting out of a taxi. The November wind knocked her over. She spent the next seven months in New York in and out of rehab facilities. She came home from one, and fell again after a couple of weeks. Then Meniere's Disease, then more falls, and more rehab. I spent those months in and out of town, taking care of my mom, trying to find work. I walked to Mt Sinai Hospital three to four times per week. This is one of the Sidewalk Memories.

Artist Statement

I learned photography through a variety of approaches and teachers. One, photography as a conceptual art form, with a clear about-ness of the image. The other is from a more traditionally modernist approach. As it is, and for the most part, my work in photography has something of both. While I have a deep appreciation for a beautiful formal photograph, I must ask the question I teach my students to ask; What is the photograph about? I am inquisitive about the other story, however fleeting a moment it reveals, and how it relates to photography’s visual soundness, as photography’s relationship to truth is constantly changing. I am interested in what happens visually, psychologically, and emotionally. When I alter a photograph, I am asking the question about how to re-represent, re-think, re-contextualize the original image.
I use the female figure to represent a female way bigger than me. Over many years, the alterations I make in my photos are in varying stages of the process: during exposures at night with camera movement or subject blur, after the print is made with added selective color, using appropriated text & image, collage, and digitally montaged images in a composition. What begins as an intuitive process of scenes or figures are, unsurprisingly, parts of my life.