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I like light, I like the things that can be done with it, and I like what light brings out of the things it touches. I am therefore also invested in the interrogation of darkness, and of the things to which light offers a caress and a wink rather than a bear-hug.

I try to use my lens as a sort of wedge, to leverage the alien out from under the familiar. Though I may spend hours over the same patch of decaying asphalt documenting the weeds growing up through its cracks, hopefully the viewer can come away with an impression of entire worlds previously unknown, though he or she may have walked by that same decaying asphalt thousands of times without a second glance.

When I collaborate with a model, of course, it’s quite different, as I am documenting the literal and very image of God; and if, as Blake tells us, everything appears as infinite when the doors of perception are cleansed, how much a greater expanse of infinity might be glimpsed through a being bearing the signature of the Divine?

My work is necessarily confined by the act of capturing light with a light-sensitive surface, or by a series of such acts: the shoot. No matter how much post-processing goes on after the fact (sometimes a great deal, and sometimes none at all), it all begins with light collected by a lens and focused onto a sensor. And when successful, the shoot is characterized both by the feeling of “flow” during the act itself, as though everything had been scripted by a Higher Power and nothing can go wrong, and by the stamp left on the finished print of that same sensation, a participation in the uncreated Light behind Creation.

“The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” ~ Matthew 6:22