Going through the archives and putting together the website--finally. I'm uploading a few images here first to get a feel for what I want on the site. This group of images represents a series I've been shooting since 2007. It's the zen project I turn to when the highly controlled work becomes too much. Funny that it's supposed to be a zen project because it's actually been fraught with all types of hazards. Many of the images have been posted here before, but this is the first time they're being posted together as a full group. The first ones up are here for the first time, and there are new ones on the way. An explanation and rough draft for an artist statement follow the images.
Summer-Fall 2007
Senior Year, 2009-2010
This is a rough (very) draft from Dec '09 for an artist statement for this body of work. It was cobbled together from a couple of random thoughts and comments copy/pasted from emails sent to my sister Erin, also a photographer, with whom I’d been discussing the project in depth off and on for about a year. My original artist statement from 2007 was lost, and I found that in my conversations I’d said a lot about where the imagery was coming from. One good thing about email conversations vs face to face, I suppose. The grammar is poor, but the meaning is there. The last two paragraphs were part of an attempt to pull 5 of my 20 images from my thesis project to create a sub-project. For our senior show, I would only be able to hang 4 images and felt a need to pare things way down. Didn't go over very big, I'm afraid. So, stick to what you know, I guess. The images pulled from that thesis were actually supposed to come out like the original fuzzy, tangled tree images from 2007, but when I switched cameras for the sake of swiftness in the woods (4x5 with hazy brass lens to Lubitel), the effect wasn't the same. I loved the look of the new images though and would have enjoyed pursuing it more, but the images were too much like a group that an instructor of mine had done. That was his baby, and for me to go that route when he was already exploring it wouldn't have been right. I continue to shoot these things when I see them, but it's not a project I actively work on.
Dec 9, 2009:
I grew up in the vast concrete wilderness that is the O.C. in CA. My
family went camping a lot, but we usually went to the deserts for that.
Occasionally, though, we would go to the mountains and the woods. It
was like another planet for me. All of the trees and small waterways
were completely foreign to me, and each moment spent in those
places was a true exploration. These images are as close as I can get
to that same sort of discovery.
Memory is a fluid and creative thing. It alters reality, as I’m sure it has
altered my impressions of the places I saw in my childhood. Those
places seem almost too enchanted now to have ever been real. Maybe
that’s how they really are for a little kid—I don’t know. There seemed
to be a purpose to their existence because they were so rare.
Southern California is very dry, even in the mountains, so these green
and wooded areas with running streams are isolated and not easy to
find. The places I shoot in out here are totally surrounded by suburban
developments. They seem every bit as isolated, rare and enchanted as
the places I remember from camping in California.
What I want to convey is a sense of an uncommon and natural place
that is off the beaten path and hard to find. Something that is rare,
mysterious, and has a purpose and life all its own.
The Lubitel (original Lomo camera) has a cheap lens on it that isn’t
corrected for spherical or chromatic aberrations, and I knew that this
would create a swirling in the background blur and some strong
vignetting. I chose this camera because I felt the swirling would call
attention to the tangles of the plants and trees and to the dizzying
effects of the high canopy.
I look for anything that seems a little extraordinary and what a
person won’t necessarily see if they stick to the trail. I get into some
pretty hard to reach places and fully expect to get a bad case of poison
ivy one of these days. The trees and other plants have a symbiotic
relationship that is sometimes beneficial to each and sometimes
deadly to one. They support each other and weigh each other down at
the same time. Life in the woods is very much like life elsewhere
except that it moves very slowly. I look for relationships between the
various elements in the scenes.
I want to draw the eye to those specific relationships and the
beautiful contours and shapes that have been created by them over
time. Most of these images have been shot at the edges of the woods
where man has cultivated the land adjacent to it with farms or
suburban developments. The plants create a barrier here that is sort of
like a scar. It’s thick, complex, and tough to get through.
