With the exception of a few rocks, none of them are from childhood collections, and none came from the family attic. I do not choose objects for sentimental reasons. A dove- pigeon can be a symbol of peace and love, a humorous creature, or a dirty street pest depending on its context and the experience of the viewer. Shadows of figures can move forward threateningly or run away. We overlap extensively for some, for others, large segments remain private because of what we bring to the image from our own lives. I expect that each of us has a circle of meaning for each image we see. This is not to say that whole photographs are ambiguous. I invite those who see my pictures to participate with their own thoughts. Where there are gaps with insufficient information, we tend to fill them in with handy thoughts of our own. A hole in the map, a puzzling phenomenon, and an ambiguous image all invite speculation and invention. Even if it is rigidly confined at its edges a photograph can still have areas of brightness or shadow left for exploration.Īlthough I work primarily in my own studio, I often think of those who had the courage to go beyond the edge of the map, in body or spirit, especially those who tried to make sense out of what they saw, or thought they saw. The velvet lined case picture is gone, but the glut of photographic images we experience daily cannot erase the power of the edge of the photograph to structure and call attention to what is within. This is not, however, a precious keepsake box. If it does enter a photograph, it will be in a limited space defined by the edge of the image. What I bring home may or may not end up in a photograph. When I am browsing along a gutter or entering a junk shop, and someone asks what I am looking for, I have to say that I don't know until I see it. Often, I use old objects, for as the Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz said 'I am much more interested in an old piece of burlap than a new one, for the beauty of an object is to me, in the quantity of information I can get from it, the stories it has to tell.' If I use new or organic materials they only become interesting in context a bone and a machine part must transform each other. My intention is not to document objects but to see them in a new context where they take on a presence dependent on the world within each photograph. There is a fluctuation between visual intuition and an editorial process that presses me to throw out what is not working and to go beyond the content level of individual objects. I work intuitively, but only part of the time. Objects rich in human implications are the ones which interest me. What if each cereal box, grapefruit rind, and hub cap were perceived to have its own moving spirit? Today, some anthropologists try to figure us out by checking our garbage. Reading objects, Archaeologists search for meaning in bones, earth, and stone. We are learning the rules of the forest, but we know little about the rules of the city dump. Increasingly there is a manmade landscape too, some of it beneficial and some of it unforeseen and chaotic. In the past, people primarily had to make sense of the natural world. In thinking about the way we understand both contemporary objects and old objects as well as the way people have understood objects at different points in time, I wonder at the vast changes in the human world in an instant of geologic time. All is uncertainty and change, but optimists and bingo players are on the lookout for moments of perfect knowledge and perfect cards. New ideas form, the old are shattered, and sometimes old ideas pop up again among the new like graffiti on a wall. By the seventeenth century, clockwork explanations begin to invade the spirit world, opening doors to modern physics. Animals floated in the night sky, and each object had its own 'Anima Motrix', its’ own moving spirit. For most of human history, people have looked to the spirit world to explain what was going on. I am interested in the way people think about the unknown. I will not attempt to explain their meaning in verbal terms, because my process is visual, but I can suggest what is on my mind. These photographs have been assembled as a book so that they can speak together.

Escape the files anima motrix