I like to avoid labels and descriptions. It is our attempt to clarify and classify people into shoeboxes, a way for our minds to compartmentalize what it cannot otherwise perceive. I’ve called myself a photographer, journalist, and artist, but really I’m just a human being with a camera. I like to make images of all sorts of things, namely the interaction of light on the natural landscape. Sunrises, sunsets, stars, – open spaces undisturbed by artificial hand of man.
These places can be beautiful to the human eye, but needn’t be limited to our finite visual spectrum. Some images come from dreams and imaginations, the altered perceptions of reality produced by a marriage of the cameras technical attributes and this planets ability to produce beauty in many different places and forms. I’m comfortable in these places, the cold dawn of the Rio Grande in January, or a fiery Sunset in New Mexico.
Eckhart Tolle once said that artists were drawn to their craft because it brought their mind out of the constant barrage of preoccupied conscious thought and allowed them to be disconnected from the active human mind and gain real consciousness with their place in the universe. I feel making images does this for me. I feel that my work reflects this sense of place, an impression of awe that we are so fortunate to walk this 3rd planet from the sun and have the ability to appreciate it and experience it. Away from the noise of industrialized life, cell phones, and fleeting temporal creations, reality exists. I have been fortunate to travel so extensively at this point in my life, and gain joy from sharing the places I have been with others. Each image has its own story, set of challenges in being made, and a host of conditions that accompany it.
I am also fascinated by what man has left behind. In images of abandoned places we see that temporal nature of what humans create. What is made eventually returns back to the earth where it came from. The process is beautiful in the slow degradation of a structure, paint, or machine. It reminds us of our own mortality and that one day we will become dust, but also part of the earth again.