Artist Statement
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.
I take great pleasure in the tactile technologies of photography: loading film, adjusting f-stops, reading contact sheets. I prefer film to digital, toy camera to professional, and my collection of plastic and antique film cameras continues to grow. Toy and antique cameras provide unexpected mystery, and because I teach, work with, and conduct research on new media technologies, a welcome detachment from the digital. They, like many of my subjects, suggest in their structures and technologies the presence of history.
For example, in Chocolates, I have created a series of photographs that suggest the ethereal qualities of landscapes in the early morning fog. The photos were made using a Polaroid 250 Land Camera and expired Polaroid Chocolate peel-apart film. In a time when apps replicate vintage cameras, the chocolate-brown tones and textures resulting from the film’s wet emulsions suggest more emotionally and affectively a heightened sense of silence and mystery that comes with being in natural settings surrounded by fog.
I am currently an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Digital Media at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia. I was named a 2013 Delaware Division of the Arts Fellow in the category of Visual Arts—Photography. My photographs have been shown in solo and group exhibits in Delaware, New Jersey, Texas, and Utah.
I live in Media, PA, with my beautiful wife, Wendy, and our sons Hydan and Seeger.
From the Chocolates Series
Red Lion Creek in Fog
Sunday, May 21, 2013
Fog, 65 degrees
Duck Creek River Marsh
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Fog, 45 degrees