Blindsight: The Images of a One-Eyed Photographer

Being legally blind in my left eye, the camera assists my one right eye in compensating for what has been lost in the left. Within the constraints of blindness, I have learned to see. As a person with a disability, my curse has transformed into an opportunity of immeasurable value. I approach my work with a spirit of inventiveness and improvisation. Much like Wolfgang Tillmans, my ever-expanding oeuvre is eclectic and springs from a directive based on OBSERVATION ITSELF. It encompasses a broad pallet of visual stories, meanings, and atmospheres. What is most important is that the ability to peer through blindness is reason enough to make photographs every day for the rest of my life. Whether my work ends up being based on chance occurrences, documents of real life, or are staged to express a psychological or political theme, my work is always about a visual experience. During the early development of the photographic medium practitioners were afforded the necessary creative freedom to work from a place of naiveté and play. This inventiveness was expressed deeply in surrealism and I have a strong affinity for it within a historical context. The fundamental premise of freedom is something essential to the process of creating impactful work. My method spirals back to the origins of photography, and enters into a dialog with artists such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Man Ray, Lee Miller, Dora Maar, and Claude Calhoun. Arno Rafael Minkkinen's text about my work says it well: "Photographs need to stand on their own. Discussion also needs to center on picture analysis and not just the merits of what corrals pictures into a project with a beginning, middle and end. And when that happens, the power of the photograph itself is rekindled, able to enthrall us, shake us, and move us."