[photograph] 21 Oct 2012

My work process involves photographing fields of matter and discovering what these fields, within the structure of this media, can potentially yield. Recently, I have been working with India ink applied to translucent drafting film, which is hung and backlit for photographing. I shoot with an 8×10 camera and print in a traditional color darkroom. The subject matter is not a construct of previously sketched and carefully rendered images. It is rather a documentation of collaborative happenstance with material and mark, and with the catalytic ability for photography to shift this literal matter into potential notions of reference. Photographs now seem as abundant as words, taken in as a grammar or code. My work has become a sort of code, or formal system in my mind: reducing infinite subject-hood to simple planes of matter to be photographed and perceived. I am intrigued by the impulse to comprehend and read this language, and am informed by the context and image body we bring with us to any one photographic object or lens based gesture. Considering all we bring, I tend to eliminate much, reducing the photogenic possibilities down to a blank sheet of drafting film, ink, and a discipline with analog photography. From this place of uncertainty comes some sort of measurable mark. The camera takes it, and we take the image. For my thinking, the process is no longer about specific idea or creative gesture, but about certain distances of form and media yielding to potential.