November 2012
Artist’s Statement
For me, making pictures is like seeing something magical in the mundane. I usually photograph places and things that are near and familiar a studio portrait of a friend, a botanical in the back-yard, a rural cityscape or landscape in mid-Alabama that I passed through as a child with my dad, or maybe just a downtown view of some portion of an old building. What I’m particularly interested in is the commonplace and those wonderful instances where mystery seems to lie in wait, present, or at least it seems present when I am observing it closely. Like the mystery and magic of the cigar box that Scout opens in the beginning of To Kill A Mockingbird … she opens that drab little box as she hums in that delightfully sweet way and reveals all those familiar and seemingly mundane trinkets, and suddenly the contents and the box itself become extraordinary and very important.
Biography
I became interested in photography in the early 1970s, and started working part-time in a local photo lab while in college. It was in 1974 that I discovered The Daybooks of Edward Weston and how making photographs could be a passion and expression of one’s place in the world. I soon began working as a medical photographer in the College of Medicine at the University of South Alabama, learning on the job, and making pictures on the weekends for myself. My interest was in black-and-white photography, and I liked my pictures to be sharp, clear, and full of detail.
I began using larger cameras for my personal work; from 35mm I went to roll film, then to sheet film in 4×5, 5×7, and 8×10 formats and finally to 8×20. In these larger formats I discovered contact printing and the rich smoothness of image tones, textures and detail. In the past several years, I have gone full circle, and I have been working in color again. I started with digital photography as I was using digital in my job, but have since abandoned digital and am now using 35mm film. It’s a new way to see for me, a looser, less composed and more intuitive response to the world around me.
