Author and Artist
From my first 35mm point-and-shoot to the DSLR behemoths I use today, photography was always a means of artistic expression before it ever became a professional enterprise. The way it can compress light and shadow, depth and form, down to a flat plane has always been a compelling, if not slightly aggravating process.
In 2004, I discovered the work of Gregory Crewdson, which would mark a dramatic turning point in my photographic work (or, more accurately, the beginning of anything I could call proper photographic art). Though his enormous, lush, Hollywood-funded photos weren’t something I could replicate, they did teach me that photography didn’t have to express life as we knew it. Instead, photography could show life as we wanted it to be.
I began to build detailed miniatures, purposefully constructed and lit throughout hours of micro-engineering, all for a single shot. Some of my biggest frustrations in accomplishing a photographic concept I had born was finding a fitting locale, willing and able actors, and somehow lighting it all exactly as I’d imagined it. I didn’t want to photograph life as I’d found it, I wanted to craft the photo as I’d dreamed it; I wanted to paint with objects and people and light. Miniatures were a successful, attainable, and—among my peers at the time—a novel way of achieving the results I was looking for. These were freeing experiments, bending and expanding the expectations I had for my own art, and soon I was building and crafting other kinds of physical objects to photograph.
Today, I’m still constructing things to shoot, but they tend to be greatly simplified compared to those I used to build. Reducing an image to two primary colors by way of its construction rather than by post-processing in Photoshop is an interesting challenge, and using shadows to not only add depth to an image but in fact create much of the image has been fulfilling. But after years of carefully constructed, neurotic perfection and lofty self-expectations, I’ve now begun exploring the loss of meticulous detail in favor of ambiguous, out-of-focus and incomplete shapes and forms.
On this page is a mere sampling of some of my work, both recent and old; most are just single examples from various series I've done. I will add to this page progressively.