Artist’s Statement
I make photographs, and it is said that a photograph captures a moment in time—an event, perhaps. That may be, but the source of this notion originates in the mechanical manifestations of cameras, lenses, and film. People do not capture moments of time. How would we do that? Our personal experience of time is not static. The events in our lives will not hold still long enough to be captured.
Some photographic records cascade memories and emotions. A wedding portrait, for example, is an icon that represents the events of the wedding day. Every person in attendance experienced the event filtered by their own histories—seeing the portrait, that is what comes to mind. Seeing the portrait at a later date, and then again at a much later date, will evoke different memories, not because the picture, made in a moment, has changed, but because the viewer has changed. Of course, all this only pertains to the wedding participants. For the rest of us, the picture is just another anonymous wedding portrait, though it remains an icon, an encounter of a different kind.
My pictures do not capture a moment. They are photographs, but they do not depict a particular event. Grace Hartigan put it this way, “one of the most difficult things of all is not to have the painting be a depiction of the event, but the event itself.” Her words are a well-known mantra of contemporary art, but we don’t have to know the histories surrounding a picture by Caravaggio or van Eyck to add it to our personal history. In every way, art and life are inseparable. At the beginning of each day, I can speculate but cannot know that day’s events. An unexpected conversation may completely alter my assumptions or the lack of an ingredient may impact my dinner plans. It is the same when I make art.
When I make my pictures I speak to them, often out loud, and they speak back—quietly. The work is completed when, like in any conversation, the subject changes. The conversation remains encapsulated in the work, to be continued by myself or by anyone else. After lunch, perhaps, or during a long flight to Paris, or at this moment.