rare images : statement
Enormous volumes of images bombard our senses daily. Print and electronic media have pushed the delivery of photographs far beyond the early boundaries of simply fixing a real-life image on paper. We are a society experiencing a paradigm. Scientific and technological advancements are occurring at a pace faster than our comprehension of their effects on our culture.
My interest in photography evolves as an artist. It is not the technology of photography but the images I seek. I am less concerned about making photographs than I am about making art through the lense of a camera. It is about texture and color, line and form, juxtaposition and beauty found in nature, and how it all plays together in natural light.
My formal beginnings with a camera began in 1971 under the tutelage of commercial photographer, Ken Seright. From 1975 through 1980, I was co-founder and president of Slide-Z specializing in 35mm audio/visual productions. From 1981 through 1984, while studying sculpture with Professor Bob Dixon at U of I Springfield, I learned how important it was to see images three-dimensionally within a two-dimension medium. During that period my photographs were first exhibited and were first-place winners in two Illinois Times newspaper competitions.
Upon moving to Southern Illinois in 1985 my photographic interests shifted to color and my photograph of a butterfly on winter wheat won first-place in the 1987 Southern Illinoisan Kodak Snapshot Competition. With that encouragement I exhibited my photography in the 1990 Arts in Celebration Festival and I was juried as a new member into the Carbondale Artist's Cooperative. Since then I have been exhibiting regularly and have learned how to appreciate the perfect clarity of a single moment as well as transient fragilities.
Architecture and organic forms are important subjects in my search for images to photograph, but it is a fascination with how color changes in different natural light that has produced some of my personally favorite images. My camera is often focused on the subtle powers in nature and how it slowly discards the evidence of human progress left abandoned on her landscapes.