GRIDLOCKED

I've found that along with the conscious intent for any particular subject I'm photographing, later on, the subconscious and usually primary reason for the work, hits me over the head, sorta like a mackerel in a Three Stooges skit. I retired from a career as an editorial and advertising photographer in New York after a round of illnesses compelled me to rebuild my life. The past several years, I’ve returned to New York to photograph graffiti, walls, and abstractions, things that had been invisible to me while absorbed in my daily hectic routine in the city. The graffiti, ”Dialogues of the Lower East Side”, presented in a series concurrent with this submission, is intensely chaotic. It references the dialogue of street artists caught in the city’s current gentrification. By definition, it appropriates from these artists. I was slightly uncomfortable with the appropriation, and so worked on abstractions at the same time, in an attempt to craft a more visceral and separate viewpoint. I photographed these abstractions at face value, interested in composition and working with the illusion of three dimensionality I favor in all my work. Several of the images presented in this series address daily absurdities, such as the use of netting at construction sites as a barrier from the steel I-beams that might come crashing down on the unsuspecting passersby. There are even multiple layers of different types of netting material at these sites, as if one type prevents I-beam accidents while another is more successful in stopping … oh, let’s say …a construction crane. My partner Catherine used the term “optical interference” to describe these plastic veils protecting the resident from the inanimate dangers they are faced with in the urban jungle. I now live in Taos, as far removed from urban life as I’ve ever been; home to awe inspiring natural beauty as well as early American Modernism, and the late artist Agnes Martin. Agnes’ work relied a grid for the sense of precision, structure and order it gave her as a panacea for bouts of schizophrenia. I’m now aware that the chaos in “Dialogues of the Lower East Side” was a subconscious way of dealing with an episode of cancer, while “GRIDLOCKED”, this series, denotes a fitting representation of the Amsler grid, a device my ophthalmologist uses to measure the progression of macular degeneration in my left eye … something I never considered as I was shooting these images. As with Agnes, doing this work has given me a foundation to combat the fear associated with dramatic illness. Only now am aware of how all my work is both a metaphor for and deliverance from the chaos surrounding these illnesses. I'm amazed and grateful for the power that art plays as a healing and spiritual resource ...helping lift the veils from one's eyes.