nightswimming is a search.  It is a reflection.  It is introspection. 

I have been working on this series for three years and I feel that it will stay with me for a while to come.  Although on the surface it seems the work is about landscapes/cityscapes, it is much more personal and conceptual.  I am challenging the notion of classical landscapes and capturing the complexity of moment, time, and place.  The images are more like psyche portraits seducing the viewer to look deeper into the image as well as themselves.  At the same time, I have found a search for self in the process.  This work was born from an earlier series, Chapter, Verse, in which I was dealing with depression by capturing the emotions in the interiors of my home.  I decided to turn that gaze upon the exterior world.  As I healed, I was more interested in finding my place in the world and experiencing life.  This work mutated into new forms just as life adapts to its discoveries. 

Cataloging my life and travels, the work offers insight to the psychology of self and place.  I have used abstraction, color, movement, and composition to saturate the images with the emotions I felt in life and in the places they represent.  The actual place or object is not that important.  The reaction and discovery of the viewer is the ultimate achievement of these images.  I want to strain the viewer’s perceptions, make them project into the spaces, relate through their own memories and emotions.  I am there.  The cities and places I photographed are there.  I want you to be there.  

The process is discovery.  Originally, I wasn’t sure how the images would look.  I just knew how I wanted to approach them.  As the process progressed, I gained an understanding of how and what I could achieve.  The discovery giving birth to new vision.  I see the work as optical paintings making reference to the compositional conventions of cinema and abstract expressionism.

Conceptually, I draw from the German school of categorization and typology started by the Bechers, the optical discoveries and negative space challenged in Uta Barth’s work, the loneliness and singular search of humanity of Todd Hido, and the layering and symbolism associated with Pollack’s drip paintings or Twombley’s Quattro Stagioni (A Painting in Four Parts).  On one level, my images are representational landscapes/cityscapes showing the beauty and energy of a place, while on another, they resemble abstract expressionist paintings with the colors and forms signifying emotional and psychological weight as well as a typological map to the existence of self and place.  They are meant to confound the viewer with the exact meaning while giving an open platform to their understanding of its reality.

I used a toy camera modified into a pinhole to create this series, and the images are created entirely “in camera” with no digital manipulation.  While they were printed using the chromira process, they are exactly what the camera recorded on the film with conventional printing techniques observed.  This is very important to my process, as I feel it gives a stronger sense of integrity to the emotion of the images and the ability to capture my search for identity.