Beyond the Mind's Eye

I will never forget a story I heard about a painter that took drawing charcoal and ground it up and put it into his paint. When asked why he did it, his response was, “I want to make the paint dirty… gritty.” In one sense, I suppose the painter wanted to experiment with changing the texture of the paint itself, but in a larger sense I think he wanted to explore where technique would take him. To me, infrared photography is not a special effect like some Instagram filter, it is a different way at looking at photography and light and the world itself. In this project, I wanted to provide a variety of looks and color palettes that are available through infrared photography, but I also wanted show a struggle between human history, structures and artifacts, and the environment. Human structures often encroach on the environment, but over time the environment tries to envelope what is left of old human structures. I am often fascinated by the history of the sites that I photograph, even if I do not know much about the history of an old, abandoned building, I often find myself wondering about the people that once inhabited the site. An old, abandoned house was not always abandoned. Perhaps generations of a family once lived in a house and some even may have been born in the house, or may have died in the house. I wonder about who might have been the last one to close and lock the door for the last time. I wonder how long the building was left to the elements without upkeep.