 |
"My work explores the aesthetic space between documentation and narration. I try to make photographs that reveal something delightfully or disturbingly uncanny about the world, showing some unique beauty or mysterious presence."
I am a professional philosopher whose passion is photography. Fifteen years after receiving my PhD in philosophy, I earned an MFA in studio art. For many years I taught philosophy at the University of North Carolina and made art when time allowed. Initially, I created and exhibited large metal sculptures: abstract constructions made from scrap steel, which I cut and welded. As time passed, the process of working with heavy steel became more labor than love, and I looked for an alternative medium.
My transition to art photography was natural. After inheriting my first serious camera from my father, I shot slides for many years, motivated by a desire to document my travels and to get good pictures of my family and friends. After I stopped making sculptures, I converted a basement space into a darkroom and assembled enlargers, chemicals, and other paraphernalia for making black and white photographs from film. Days spent literally in the dark were as enjoyable as those earlier days spent with band saws and welders.
As the quality of photographs from digital sensors came to match that from film, I eventually replaced my chemical darkroom with my computer lab. My interest in color images returned, since in either digital camera or computer one can start with color and then convert to black and white where desirable.
I am attracted to all aspects of photography – traveling in search of images, interacting with a scene in the field, mastering technical details of the camera at hand, working with RAW images, exploring the rich resources of programs such as Photoshop, working with different professional papers and printers, cutting mats and framing the prints, showing the results in competitions and galleries and online.
I am intrigued by photography’s direct connection to reality. In my own work, however, I am not captivated either by photography’s documentary aspects – whether the image is documenting the external world or one’s own feelings – or by its narrative side, its potential for telling stories. My serious photographic work takes place in the gap between documentation and narration, where concerns with aesthetic experience are paramount.
As a philosopher, I am especially interested in relationships between photography and our concepts of perception, aesthetics and art. In the smallest nutshell, my view is this: photographs are aids to vision very much in the way that wall shadows and water reflections are; photographs can have aesthetic values independently of the things they are photographs of; photographs can be works of art just as legitimately as sculptures and paintings.
I have received numerous awards for my photographs, which have been exhibited widely and are in collections across the United States. I am represented by Points of View Photography Gallery in Raleigh N.C.
|
|
|