About the photos

People

A good proportion of what I shoot could be called “street photography” - people out in public places and without their consent. I am not generally interested in high drama or crazy moments, or in formal compositions and moody lighting. I am most interested in revealing the beauty of an infinitesimally brief moment in time and the exquisite chaos and complexity of the world — which we largely ignore or do not perceive in our day to day lives. Thus, rather than trying to exert control and reduce the world into an elegant composition, I am seeking to embrace the complexity of the now which is only intuitively experienced and that photography is best at revealing.

Me and my shadow

An often encountered problem is how to take a picture of something and avoid having your own shadow in the frame. Giving up on trying to avoid this, I started playing off of my shadow and then began to see the possibilities of including my shadow in a scene. Lee Friedlander’s book, Self-Portraits, is a key inspiration for this work.

Chain link fences

Chain link fences are an obsession of mine and I will not pass up taking a photo of a nice chain link fence. I feel a bit silly about it at times and people passing by often look around confused, trying to figure out what I’m shooting and why this fence.

I have learned a few things in the process of shooting hundreds of chain link fences. First, it’s good to embrace my obsessions and reactions. That is, I have learned not to ‘filter’ my reactions to a scene and not think too much about it. Rather than question why I find something interesting and pause to consider if it’s worth a picture - I just shoot it. It’s not useful to hesitate or doubt my instincts and gut reaction. Second, shooting a single subject like chain link fences illustrates an interesting problem in photography for me, which is how to make a successful picture of something that I have shot multiple times, that still feels fresh and new. i find that a successful picture has something special about it, and that I want to apply that rule or formula to get another successful picture. But, that doesn’t work well as applying those rules I end up with pictures that look formulaic and don’t have the element of spontaneity and dare I say, carelessness, that I am trying to achieve. I know think of it as more like jazz music and trying to improvise on a theme rather than apply some strict rule or formula. Third, I have come to see the chain link fences as collages of shapes and colors, which has increased my awareness of similar formal aspects in pictures of people and other subjects.

Ten thousand things

This is a work in progress. I am trying to find a way to edit the pictures I have that is not built around a simple subject or theme (e.g., people, Boston, chain link fences). A struggle I have had with this though is deciding on what I want to say, what is the theme or concept? I am resistant to saying anything or of feeling that I have anything to say. What I have started to explore, and what this series is about, is experimenting with letting the pictures dictate what is being said. I am playing with a process of randomly drawing pictures from my files, then ordering these as quickly as possible into something that feels right to me. In this way, I’m letting the pictures speak and direct me to the sequence and the accumulation of images to what is communicated or might be experienced by a viewer.