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Inspired by the romantic realism of American landscape painters of the
19th century, American abstract painters of the early 20th century and pop art, my work explores the idea of
the sublime as it does or doesn’t exist today, given the state of the world.
I am interested in photographing vernacular, mundane objects juxtaposed
against interesting backgrounds of a landscape or the city. One can’t quite
tell what these objects are or where they were taken because I am interested in
the suggestive, abstract qualities of the image rather than the literal. There
is an unsettling quality to them that provokes the viewers to respond to the
objects and their environment in a fresh way. Beautiful landscapes, do
they exist anymore? I can’t help but see the mark of man everywhere, no piece
of earth untouched. The idea of the sublime is not only represented in
landscapes but also in major cities, I think. New York City, for instance, has
always been an inspiration to newcomers with the monumentality of its buildings
representing unlimited possibilities--does that exist anymore or have we fallen
behind, our infrastructure crumbling, our buildings under attack?
With these questions
swirling around in my head, I use the process of photography, with its fast or
slow shutter speeds, its short or long focal lengths, the images it can capture
at a moment in time never to be repeated again, to create images that help me
come to terms with these issues. When attention is drawn to the ordinary, the
ordinary can become a poetic comment on what it means to live in our culture,
in our time.
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