VISUAL ARTIST WORKING IN CONTEMPORARY LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY

ARTIST STATEMENT

I see myself as mixture of documentarian, photographer, digital artist, and printmaker—intertwining my personal connection to the history of the American West and focusing on issues of land-use, recreation, conservation, and the confluence of the natural and human-impacted landscape.

Working with a camera as a way of exploring and documenting the world has always been a personally exciting experience. My creative process starts with a reaction to an idea or simply something seen in the world (which often involves seemingly chaotic aspects within the landscape). Then, through the camera, it transforms into an emotional interaction between myself and the subject. That interaction continues and evolves as I scan the film and work with the image on the computer. Once digitized, I work with image’s tonalities on a purely abstract level, exploring all the film has captured to create or intensify the movement and tension within the image. The final result, while still based on what was actually in front of the lens, becomes part document and part internal creation.

I have always felt that one of the most rewarding aspects of photography and printmaking is the handmade aspect of creating something with light, drawing from physical qualities of the interaction of light and metal salts that give the print an inherent potential to be a beautiful object—regardless of the subject that is actually photographed. I find the purely digital realization of the image ultimately unsatisfying, and output the digital file either as large-scale, immersive pure carbon inkjet prints, or as negatives to use with historic hand-coated photographic processes—effectively bridging the 19th and 21st centuries.