ARTIST'S STATEMENT
LIFE IS MY FOCUS: MY WAY OF SEEING
We are in an era when anyone with a digital camera or smart phone can take a good photograph, but the true Art of photography is far more complex than that. Much of my artistic work continues beyond the initial image that is captured. This process involves an intense period of revisiting and exploring the initial image. There is immense satisfaction in being able to create work via enhancement and manipulation of imagery until it satisfies my artist’s eye.
Christopher Isherwood wrote: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Someday, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed". These words resonate with me and inspire my photography and my need to capture all the beauty around me. When something catches my eye I am inspired to make it real and preserve my vision. I use my camera to fix that moment. When I then edit the photo, I bring out the subtext and story that shares my original vision.
My work is in many genres. I photograph the people I see as I travel the world. I appreciate all that exists in Nature. Photojournalism and socially relevant issues fascinate me as do Architecture and all Art. I cannot restrict my art to a single focus. My entire living experience is my focus. Henry Miller wrote: "one's destination is never a place but a new way of seeing things".
Thoreau made this journal entry that is my inspirational guide: “Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray, i.e. we are not looking for it. So, in the largest sense we find only the work we are look for”.
It is so wonderful that, for this visual medium, many of my most potent influences are both intellectual and visual and come from the written word and not solely from visual iconography.
