Festival

I’m not trying to tell a story with photos. The people in the frame tell it themselves.

I’m looking for the spark that passes between people as they live and explore with each other. Here I photograph a 3-day summer music festival, and treat it like a small, outside-the-box, city. I search for that brief moment when the chaos of life balances itself with a certain indefinable order. There’s a story in that moment.

The story is like a myth hidden below the surface. It bubbles up from beneath. We may not be sure what it’s saying, but I think the job of the photo is to get us to look and listen. What does it tell you?

Innocence Lost

Innocence Lost began as a search in a Goodwill store looking for cheap draping material for another project. Buried deep in the drapery bin in the farthest corner of the basement, I discovered the American Girl knock-off who is the subject of my current project. I was struck by the contrasts of her beautifully molded facial features and a genderless body. The physical distortions of her broken arm and disheveled hair further magnified my response. After sharing some preliminary photos, I began to appreciate the power one broken doll can hold on the imaginations of those who encounter her images.

Her name is Anemone. She believes she is a normal girl leading a normal life within a normal body. Factually, she is a discarded, broken, mass produced plastic replica of an unrealistically idealized human woman-child designed for child-play fantasy.

Her name is Anemone. She is my assistant in the exploration of what creates reality and the impact of the disruption caused through variations in the interpretation of its perception. She aids me in investigating how we experience reality by actively manifesting our perceptions. Through creating images of her, I attempt to demonstrate artistically the presence of perceptual filters that can subconsciously drive emotional responses. I hope the images of Anemone create a peculiarly compelling dissonance worthy of re-exploration beyond the first impression.

René Magritte and the Art of Illusion

These photographs are portraits of my son Adam trespassing in the world of the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte (1898-1967).  Magritte was known for painting everyday objects portrayed in non-ordinary settings. He challenged the viewer with distorted visions that convey mystery and pose dilemma.

My goal for this project was to create images that mirror Magritte’s aesthetic style while leaving reality intact.  Unlike Magritte, my scenes are true to reality. My photographs are not digitally altered. I have attempted to convey mystery and pose dilemma not by distorting reality but by challenging the imagination of you the viewer.

Not Quite Architecture                            

These impressionist images consider photography as an alternative representation of reality and recollection.  After years of photographing buildings with careful attention to light, shadow and detail to convey a sense of reality and permanence, I’m now making photographs of buildings of another sort. Intended to express the energy of architecture they also imply a sense of impermanence and the passage of time. Are these images the antithesis of architectural photography? They are photographs of buildings but they are not quite images of architecture as we know it.

Alchemy

Alchemy: combining ordinary elements and turning them into something extraordinary, sometimes in a way that cannot be explained.

Mannequins and reflections have captivated my interest as the subject of my photography for many years.  Mannequins can be a fanciful and stylized representations of people.  I take advantage of window reflections to achieve more mysterious, enigmatic, layered, and multi-dimensional pictures through the juxtaposition of the animate and inanimate, nature and architecture, the embodied and disembodied.  The observer is invited to study the reflections to discern what is inside and outside the window.

Reflections, Refractions, and Interactions

Urban environments and traveling by train anywhere are exciting to me. They cause me to reflect on the nature of humankind. We have an incessant need to build, to take over space, insert ourselves – often without consideration to what was already there and how it might be ok if weleave it be. Iʼm interested in nature’s tenacity to will itself to exist where weʼve made it nearly impossible and how it engages with our built environment.

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Construction sites are beautiful. And daunting. Big, and loud, and full of decisions that may or may not include the needs of the people or communities they are intended to serve. Still I get entranced by the beauty of the forms, the spaces and  especially the colors of construction sites in the night. One can see the skeletons of these great behemoths for only a short time. Soon they will go from rough guts and lights to streamlined glass and stone.

While the site is active, the rhythms of the workers, the booming of the machines, the grit and grind generate adrenaline. Itʼs addictive. Then the quiet calm of shooting at night is an adventure all on its own – I set up my photographic rig and am consumed by some mythical world that stands large before me.

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Roaming the landscape on trains is another way for me to observe and understand the scale of our intrusions on the terrain – some are lyrical and beautiful a perfect cohabitation of people and the rest of nature. But it often doesnʼt take long to see where weʼve imposed ourselves disrespectfully. These reflections, refractions, interactions of our organic world with our built one give me a wild sense of joy and sometimes a desperate sense of impending apocalypse. Still I love being here.

The Land Beyond the Forest

The Land Beyond the Forest is an ongoing series depicting a fading way of life in rural Transylvania. This mountainous and remote region of Eastern Europe is steeped in history and lore. The rugged Carpathian Mountains kept invaders at bay and kept the remote villages isolated from the passage of time.

I am drawn time and again to this region and these people because it reminds me of a way of life that I experienced at my grandparent’s village in Hungary every summer. As a child, I was oblivious to the hardships that people faced and experienced only kindness and warmth. With my camera I work to recapture this feeling of storybook wonder and show domestic tableaux and rural people as I remember them. My hope is to show the magic and poetry of the people who inhabit the The Land Beyond the Forest.

Yesterday’s Flowers

Yesterday’s Flowers is a series of photographs of flowers that were used in the family home in South India for daily prayers. Fresh flowers adorn and shower the Hindu gods during the daily puja rituals and remain near the idols all day. Having served their function, dried and spent, the flowers are swept up early the next morning before the new day’s prayers are chanted. Having observed these rituals for many years, I began photographing these floral remnants of prayer as a way to honor and appreciate them during this final stage of their sacred journey.

Andre and Elizabeth

In 1977, the great photographer Andre Kertesz found a small glass bust in the window of a New York City book store.  It reminded him of his late wife, Elizabeth.  It was the purchase of this inspirational figurine that allowed Kertesz to work through his overwhelming grief and transform from a broken man back into a vibrant artist. “From My Window”, Kertesz’s book of images using this figurine is for me the most emotional, romantic work of photography I have ever experienced.

About 15 years ago, inspired by the book and the story of Andre and Elizabeth, I had these figures made.  To me, they tell a story of love, longing, and redemption.

This project reimagines Andre and Elizabeth, together again, unburdened by time – living, loving, and struggling.