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Cultural Landscapes
Although I enjoy photographing the natural landscape, I frequently find
more compelling subjects in the world as shaped or deformed by human
activity and human habitation-in cityscapes, in buildings and other
structures under construction, in use, or in ruins. I am especially
interested in making images-what I call cultural landscapes-in which
buildings and other human constructions appear within and interact
with the natural environment, whether harmoniously or antagonistically.
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The Face of Rajasthan
This portfolio of close-ups and environmental portraits is the fruit of
a recent journey to Rajasthan. Located in India's desert northwest,
bordering Pakistan, Rajasthan has a distinctive history, culture, and
landscape. More than compensating for its relatively flat and semi-arid landscape
are Rajasthan's extraordinarily rich, diverse, and vibrantly colorful
religious and material culture-its festivals and fairs, its traditions of
dress and decoration-and its exceptionally photogenic people. In these
images, I have tried to capture something of this rich and vibrant diversity,
and to record the centrality of color as an expressive and communicative
medium in Rajasthani culture.
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Night Work
Mood is the dominant expressive element in my night work: Solitude,
enchantment, apprehension are among the sensations invoked. With its
forms and figures half emerging from the surrounding darkness, night
photography captures intimations of primal experience. There are strong
idiosyncratic associations for me between night photography and certain
pieces and styles of painting and music, as well as sense memories of
urban nocturnal wanderings during my youth. In night photography - by which
I mean both the images themselves and the process of making them - I find
an experience distinctly different from other forms of photography,
one in which our perceptions of light, space, and time are strangely
altered. In my night work, I seek to evoke that complex nocturnal otherness.
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Touch Stones
The images in this portfolio were captured in an area along the Arizona-Utah
border, stretching from Monument Valley in the east to Coyote Buttes in the west.
Within this relatively small area is to be found one of the most spectacular
landscapes upon the face of the earth. And while to stand within this landscape
is to feel its almost overwhelming power and grandeur, to walk across its surface
is also to experience in the most immediate and tactile way its extraordinary
fragility: As our own footsteps unavoidably crush the sandstone and erode
the land forms, we become minor agents in the grand process of metamorphosis.
Shape, tone, and texture are the formal values upon which Touch Stones is grounded.
Here I have sought to capture both the monumentality and the delicacy of the
southwestern landscape, and to convey to the beholder a palpable sense of
its myriad textures and patterns.
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