About

I mostly make images to say that life is astonishing.

My images are photographs, objects that are subjective assemblages of objective elements. Nothing is added, removed, enhanced, or diminished that makes them substantively unfaithful.

This was how most photographs were made until relatively recently, despite the fact that even traditional photography inherently transforms in ways that our eyes do not (e.g., blurring motion, reducing color to monochrome, unnatural contrast). These distortions are limited and generally understood. None of these change the fact that a photograph of, say, a full moon breaking through a circular opening in a frame-wide expanse of billowy cloud represents an actual and somewhat extraordinary occurrence presented through craft.

Capitalism, among its other impacts (including making photography available to the masses in the first place), has in the end largely destroyed the photograph.

In its relentlessness it has broadly deskilled the craft, making the photograph something harder to appreciate. Autofocus, camera modes, in-camera processing, post-production effects, play-with-me sliders, presets, and other widgets to various degrees do it for us, at its worst simply offering variations of machine work from which to select and call our own.

That remarkable moon-break no longer suggests an understanding of light and exposure, dedication to capturing the natural world, nor even a photographer having to look up.

By enabling photographic digital art and generative imaging (which includes clearly-unreal images, but apparently-real ones too), capitalism has transformed the photograph from something essentially authentic (or obviously not so) to something overall disinterested in authenticity.

The moon-break, however artfully presented, has been rendered possibly imaginary, a drawing, a moon on a page with clouds around it.

Photography overall now mystifies. It even downgrades the actual world, as seemingly-real photographic digital art artificially raises expectations of what compelling things look like.

I hope that by declaring my images as photographs they can better convey the perfectly astonishing as-is world around us.