Artist Statement
These photographs are about love, and grief, and comfort. They're from a series of explorations of organic forms (including plants, sea creatures, nests, and bones), isolated by a sweeping beam of light in the dark. They're also a eulogy for a diminishing natural world, a meditation on visual rhythms and rhymes that aren't easy to notice, codes we're not smart enough to interpret, as pieces of the pattern vanish day by day.
Process Statement
The process for some of these is somewhat unusual, with digital technology replacing not only the darkroom, but the camera as well. I'm shooting with a flatbed scanner, which offers interesting opportunities and limitations. Unlike a traditional camera, it captures an image by slowly moving both the light and the lens across the subject, essentially lighting and photographing it from multiple angles in one long exposure. This produces a single image stitched together from thousands of tiny slivers, to which I then make endless, minute adjustments.
This offers a view that can't be seen through a camera lens or the naked eye, and illumination that can't be duplicated with fixed lights. It also offers a uniquely detailed view, as I magnify each image and work on it down to a level of detail that will never be seen in the finished print. High-resolution prints can be as wide as fifty-eight inches (image area).