Incongruous Pieces

Artist Statement: INCONGRUOUS PIECES Virginia Woolf, in her essay "American Fiction", wrote: "But in America there is baseball instead of society; instead of the old landscape which has moved men to emotion for endless summers and springs, a new land, its tin cans, its prairies, its cornfields flung disorderly about like a mosaic of incongruous pieces waiting order at the artist's hands...”. As an expatriate American photographer living in France for the past fourteen years, I make periodic return visits to America and have been struck by those uniquely American sights that form the mosaic of this project. With each trip back to visit family and friends, I am more conscious of the unique iconography of Americana. None of these images could have been taken anywhere other than America. I yearn to expand the vision by delving deeper by means of a Robert Frank-like journey by car across the country in search of even more visual symbols and moments that describe and define the patchwork quilt that is America. The project is a visual diary of the country I have left behind. This distance allows me to see things that I never noticed while living in the United States. It also makes me much more sensitive to those elements that are visually unique, eclectic, and/or anachronistic. I have lacked concentrated time to expand this project to its full potential. The project will be my effort to bring my aesthetic to the moments, scenes and landscapes that I observe and record. In essence, I hope to honor Virginia Woolf's challenge to an artist to bring order to America's incongruous pieces. Ultimately, I anticipate printing archival color digital prints of this journey with the added expectation of working on a book for publication. I can also imagine experimenting with alternative processes, such as platinum/palladium, on some images.