LensCulture Editor Review

"Organics" is a collection of images of natural elements nearing the end of their life cycle. The impermanence of the natural world has fascinated me ever since I was a little kid. I collected fragments of bones uncovered by spring thaws, shriveled cabbage leaves left over from fall harvests and delicate birds nests when snows began to fall and I knew that they'd disintegrate in the fierce winter winds. When I was young, the thought of all those living things dying and crumbling back into the earth seemed less like the comforting cycle of life than cruel abandonment, something that one day would happen to me. It still haunts me. I want to stop the inevitable and keep these fragile treasures from being forgotten. I have only two choices really. I can try to arrest the cycle by scavenging and then carefully storing the things I collect. But that's impractical; nature never stops on it's own accord. Leaves continue to crumble, bones get brittle and nests will eventually fall apart. So I have settled on photography - a way to capture the beauty of natural objects, at a fixed point in time and keep them around for at least as long as I am. The overlap of foreground and background-- old and new -- is a tonal interpretation of what happens in the physical world when dry leaves curl and fall to the ground or when new shoots of bamboo leave behind the cones that shaped them. Boundaries blur and endings become beginnings.