EUROPEAN TRAVELS
Through numerous travels in the Mediterranean region between the years 1983-2001, I developed a love and respect for the act of traveling as a means to gain knowledge, experience, and insight - and as a conduit to the past as it resides, often uncomfortably, with the present. As with my work in the American West, drifting was a strategy through which to ensure novelty rather than the fulfillment of expectations. Photographing was a means through which I could heighten my awareness and attention to continually shifting environments. The cultivation of symbols and meanings, space and time, and the creation of new moments held my gaze. Photographs possess a mysterious and irreconcilable quality, in that they are documents that always reside in the past, yet are always drawn into continual presence.
NEW YORK (Street and Studio)
I lived in NYC in 1983-84. While pursuing constructed work, I also photographed in residential and industrial areas of Brooklyn and Coney Island. Of particular interest to me were the minimal and structural possibilities of dilapidated fringe areas of Brooklyn. On a Sunday these places were still and quiet. This was a locale where unlikely relationships could be found; a young tree seeming to sprout from corrugated metal with the majesty of Manhattan skyscrapers looming in the background - smokestacks, bridges, and discarded tires, all competing for a spot in the scene. Coney Island, conversely, is a singular place; a beloved New York playground that had fallen on hard times but was still a place by the water where one could escape the rigors of city life. Both places were dynamic, transitory; one could feel the weight of the present settling uncomfortably over what had been.