I almost always have a camera at hand, and I make photos on my commute to work, as I’m running errands, when I take my daughter for a walk, or while I cycle out of the city for exercise. I started shooting film (again, I suppose, due to my age) a few years ago, and that marked the beginning of using cameras more consciously to gain perspective on location, migration, memory, and forgetting. I have moved around a lot in my life, and photography has become a meditative realm in which I seek out evidence of clarity, humor, mystery, indeterminacy, and confusion as well as parallels between the places where I’ve lived.
I am drawn to infrastructure and transport (especially railroad tracks), industrial sites, urban outskirts, architectural concerns, desolate spaces, the well-lit mundane, banal patterns, portal structures, rougher textures and stone, found sculptures and detritus, material contradictions, fragmented signage, objects discarded and overlooked, amusing juxtapositions, non-verbal and non-narrative forms.
What I am drawn to is not original. It is only by attempting to move away from overt documentation of nostalgia and melancholy that I continue making photographs. I seek to use photography as a lethatechnique – that is, as a way to forget anxieties and limitations. I am interested in making images that are as much about the act of photographing for the benefit of contemplation and relief as about forgotten locations, dates, origins, and stories. I try to engage in productive forgetting through the common demands of selection, framing, and response; the pacing and choices involved in shooting film; and a negotiation of the thin line between successful and failed images. Along with music and writing, I utilize photography to make sense of how and why I’ve wound up where I am and how to move forward creatively and mindfully.
Reblogged this on LETHATECHNIQUE.