My goal as a photographer is to compose images that suggest. Depending on the location, time of day, subject, and media used, my images suggest a story or a history or a feeling. If I am successful the image suggests all three. The media I use to make my photographs are essential to the compositions themselves—the camera, the film (if any), the subject, and my goals for the image must complement each other.

For example, in my recent series, 2335 McCoy Road, I chose to photograph a decaying 200-year-old barn and surrounding farmland with a Polaroid 250 Land Camera and expired Chocolate peel-apart film. The camera and the film complement the decaying barn because, like the barn, they are anachronistic in a fast-paced digital world. Further, the chocolate-brown tones of the film and the textures resulting from the wet emulsions suggest a more significant history than if the images were made with a digital camera. And just as the structure of the barn was at the mercy of the weather so too was the peel-apart film: in a cool morning fog the brown tones turned pink and suggested an ethereal quality that would be impossible to replicate in Photoshop. My images of the barn made with a Canon AE-1 and a Brown Target Six-20 similarly enhance qualities embedded in the historic buildings themselves: grittiness, weight, manual operations, nostalgia, antiquity.

Lately I have been attempting to suggest the ethereal qualities of natural settings in the early morning mist and fog through the use of the Polaroid 250 Land Camera and expired Chocolate peel-apart film. At that time of day, the film records details in the foreground, forcing the viewer to pay close attention to nature’s intricacies, and shadowy impressions in the background, suggesting a much larger landscape. Between the detail and the fog rests the story.

I regularly use the following cameras because together with their films they facilitate the kinds of images I hope to make:

• Holga 120S
• Polaroid 250 Land Camera
• Canon AE-1
• Kodak Brownie Target Six-20
• Kodak 3a Folding Pocket Camera.

When I shoot digital I use a Nikon D90.

I am currently an Associate Professor of Writing Arts at Rowan University. I have taken photography classes with The University of Texas at Austin Informal Classes, the Rocky Mountain School of Photography with Mark Johnson, and photographers David Johndrow and Kent Weakley. My photographs have been shown in two solo exhibits (in Newark and Wilmington, DE) and multiple group exhibits in Delaware, New Jersey, and Utah.