Those of us not asleep subdued to mark
How the cold creeps as the fire dies at length,—
How drifts are piled,
Dooryard and road ungraded,
Till even the comforting barn grows far away
—Robert Frost, “Storm Fear”
My images do not document physical landscapes. Instead they embody the contradiction of light and dark forces we feel in the natural world. The “places” of my images do not exist in the world we can touch.
The concept of photography as pure metaphor was central to Alfred Stieglitz’s cloud series “Equivalents”. In the 1920s and 1930s Stieglitz spent nearly a decade photographing clouds, not to record specific cloud formations, but to convey and to be equivalent to emotions and ideas. While Stieglitz’s cloud pictures are far more abstract than mine, his idea that the meaningful content of a photograph is not a literal representation of physical reality informs my work.
Digital tools give photographers as much expressive latitude as painters. I take full advantage of that latitude. All of my images are altered, and almost all are composited from as many as two dozen original pictures. I often spend several weeks working on a single image.
I’ve been a photographer for a long time because I like making images.