As we move through space and time, what were static objects around us become events, drawing our eyes through the logic of intuition and helping to define our sense of mystery in the visual world. I use the camera as an extension of my eye in an effort to understand and map out this logic, snapping pictures without stopping to compose or arrange the things around me.

Since the camera uses its own, separate logic, in many cases my photographs become wholly new discoveries, unrecognizable from what I originally saw. Yet they are always products of my engagement with my surroundings; if I flick my wrist or rotate my hand while pressing the shutter, these gestures can become defining elements in the resulting photograph.

I often enlarge my images to a near life-size scale in a way that magnifies the tension between these images as documents—records of “objective” reality--and their more expressionistic underpinnings. At this size I can also explore relationships between photography and painting that intrigue me. One of the challenges landscape painters such as Constable have faced, for instance, is how to invest a work with uniqueness and authorship while retaining a sense that this insight emerged through careful observation of real landscapes. My landscape photographs address this problem from the other direction. They leverage photography's documentary qualities while working toward ideas of authorship by finding analogues between painterly artifacts such as brush strokes and idiosyncrasies of the photographic process, such as motion blur, film grain, and unexpected effects of light.

--11/2007