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Rainenso, 2024
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288 Variations of a Cloudy Sky (Twenty-four Exposures at One Stop
Intervals Printed with all Twelve Ilford Multigrade Filters), 2019.Film: Rollei RPX 25
Lens: Leica Summilux 35mm
Camera: Leica M6X-Axis: 1/1000 @ f/16, 1/1000 @ f/11, 1/1000 @ f/8, 1/1000 @ f/5.6, 1/1000 @ f/4, 1/1000 @ f/2.8, 1/1000 @ f/2, 1/1000 @ f/1.4, 1/500 @ f/1.4, 1/250 @ f/1.4, 1/125 @ f/1.4, 1/60 @ f/1.4, 1/30 @ f/1.4, 1/15 @ f/1.4, 1/8 @ f/1.4, 1/4 @ f/1.4, 1/2 @ f/1.4, 1" @ f/1.4, 2" @ f/1.4, 4" @ f/1.4, 8" @ f/1.4, 16" @ f/1.4, 32" @ f/1.4, 64" @ f/1.4
Y-Axis: 00, 0, 1/2, 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, 4, 4.5, 5
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Readymade - The Color of Water, 2020.
On March 2nd, 2020 at approximately 10AM, I found this piece of film on the beach at Abalone Cove in LA County, California. I have no idea how long it was at sea. And chemically, I don't know exactly why it turned light blue (that's not the color of any film base that I'm aware of, and it doesn't have any images or other information on it, aside from the wear of time). I like to think, though, that it was desperately trying to record that long swim, and so it seems to have become the color of water. Strangely, this readymade object is a discovery that seems so much more elegant than a multi-year project about the oceans that I was working at at the time. Like Duchamp's Fountain, it felt like check mate.
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Early Morning with Fog Droplets Condensing on my iPhone, lightbox, 2014.
Early one morning I went for a walk, but I could barely see through the thick fog. It was raining, but just ever so slightly: fine misty droplets. The landscape seemed monochrome: just grey and white as I walked along the river. I came to what I knew was a vista, I’d passed by it many times, but I couldn’t see much of anything through the thick fog that morning. Still, I held my camera in front of my face and stared into it. As I started taking photographs, tiny droplets fell onto the screen, and little RGB gems seemed to form on that grey landscape. Photography changed everything.
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Staring at the Sky and the Screen
The challenge of rendering three-dimensional space onto two-dimensional surfaces is a prehistoric one, as old as the petroglyphs that dot the earth. Photographic was a critical step to solving this: a precise mechanical means to copy the world, and it is becoming easier and easier to do every year. That has created a fascinating challenge: today, as our lives are mediated by smartphones and computers, we inhabit a world of man-made image almost as much, and in some cases likely even more, than the physical world. And now we must reconcile the two in new ways.
We continue to develop more and more technologies to make up for our body’s limits. These range from familiar tools such as cameras and microphones to specialized remote sensors made to record what is inaccessible to us, like detecting subatomic particles or the temperatures on the surface of the sun. Using statistics, experimentation, and intuition we can process this information and, hopefully, start to make sense of it.
Reconciling the information from my senses with what is recorded by new technologies and images is a challenge. But while doing so I’ve noticed a charged spaced between these two worlds, and in this space, is fertile ground to grow new ideas. Here, I try to make sense of a world that is now odd combination of direct observation/perception and what I’ve learned from experimentation and abstract reasoning. Figuring out which of these two approaches to trust is becoming increasingly challenging as I am presented with more and more points of view. What I rely on is a murky blend of information, intuition, knowledge, and skepticism.
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Gray/Blue Big Skies, 2020/2022
It is really quite easy
to take a B&W photograph
of our beautiful big sky,
and turn it into a color image,
it just takes one little curve,
turn that frown upside-down,
and a gray day very suddenly,
becomes a blue day. -
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Straight Rainbows with Comets (1, 2, 3, & 4), 2019
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Dark Skies: A Collection of 100 Makeshift Black Squares from Instagram’s #blackouttuesday, 2020
George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin on May 25th, 2020. This event was a particularly grotesque example of long-standing violence and profiling that African Americans have experienced at the hands of the police and federal government in the United States of America throughout the nation’s history.
Exacerbated by the innumerable stresses caused by the coronavirus pandemic (which have disproportionately affected marginalized communities of color), protests and demonstrations erupted across the United States, and the world, at a scale not seen since the 1960’s. Many of these in person, but others in digital space.
One such event was on Tuesday June 2nd, 2020. #blackouttuesday flooded the social media platform Instagram. It was organized as a protest against the racism and inequality that people of color face every day. The simple gesture of posting a black square to Instagram quickly went viral, creating an endless scroll of black.
Most such images were “pure” black… squares with every pixel having a value of #000000. Others had subtle graphic elements in them, such as text like “black lives matter.” But this grid shows 100 “makeshift” black squares… Photographs that people took of empty-ish spaces and/or edited down to as dark as possible.
I found such images exceptionally beautiful, like the night sky: they contained subtle shades, gradients, and noise. Each one showing a unique and nuanced point-of-view. So, I collected them. The squares in this grid document 100 individuals’ struggles with their cameras in order to create a black photograph.
You see, cameras’ light meters try to make an exposure of 18% gray. Because of this, it is difficult to make a black photograph. So, if you listened to you light meter when photographing black skin, the resulting image would have a value much closer to white skin. Thus, to make a properly exposed image, you need to adjust the camera.
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Seeing Spots: Macular Degeneration and Cataracts, 2012.
My father's father had macular degeneration and my mother's father had cataracts. They both served in the Pacific during WWII, and they both liked to be out on boats, they loved the open water of Lake Erie. Practical men, unlike their flighty arty grandson. I imagine them, staring intently at the horizon, as their decaying eyes began to obscure the view. I imagine one, then I imagine the other, as I gaze out at the great lake that they both loved so dearly.
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Chromatic Abberation I (Murder of Crows), 2017.
Chromatic Abberation noun – chromatic aberration \ krō-ˈma-tik a-bə-ˈrā-shən – The material effect produced by the refraction of different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation through slightly different angles, resulting in a failure to focus. It causes colored fringes in the images produced by uncorrected lenses.
“Most of my best ideas started as jokes,” G.B. Shaw said. And John often told me that. It’s strange for a perfectionist like him, an incredible craftsman, to say this. But that’s John for you, you never know when the levity stops and when the seriousness begins. His prints are beautiful rich B&W silver gelatin. He never took color photography seriously.
Meggan joked about her crows: changing chromatic to crow-matic. She’d spent a lot of time taking photographs of crows. Photographs that she now thinks of as a mistake. Well, maybe mistake is too strong a word; perhaps aberration is a better way to describe it? They just no longer seemed to fit with what she was about.
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Chromatic Abberation II (Skewer of Egrets), 2017.
Chromatic Abberation noun – chromatic aberration \ krō-ˈma-tik a-bə-ˈrā-shən – The material effect produced by the refraction of different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation through slightly different angles, resulting in a failure to focus. It causes colored fringes in the images produced by uncorrected lenses.
I’ve spent a lot of time photographing birds without a telephoto lens. At first I isolated them from the landscape, as they interacted with the geometry of the grid and abstracted into data. A strange moment fixed by the lens of the camera. These birds react to the geometry of an imagined lens, and I only imagined photographing them...
There’s a wide place along the river with rich dark mud near the rookery. The egrets hunt there at sunset, so stark and white in the sun’s rays, the contrast is incredibly stark. But at the same time, heat waves create distortion causing the bodies to waver and ripple. It is on odd liminal space where they seem to move in and out of existence.
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Chromatic Abberation III (Tidings of Magpies), 2017.
Chromatic Abberation noun – chromatic aberration \ krō-ˈma-tik a-bə-ˈrā-shən – The material effect produced by the refraction of different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation through slightly different angles, resulting in a failure to focus. It causes colored fringes in the images produced by uncorrected lenses.
I used to try to line up the world perfectly with the camera, but lately I’ve been thinking much more about the importance of mistakes and celebrating the accidents. These photographs consider the effects of chromatic aberration, digitally created to emphasize it even more than any uncorrected lens that I know of.
Chromatic aberration is most apparent along high contrast edges: where black meets white and white meets black. More than any bird I know, the magpie embodies this, with plumage alternating between pure white and iridescent black. And that cackle, I always feel like they know something I don’t and that they’re laughing at me.
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Breathe: Self as the Horizon, 2014.
For three years, I had a knot in my chest, I coughed all the time and felt horrible. It made me want to curl up into a ball. The problem was I had forgotten how to breathe: I was pulling air in rather than expanding my body out. So, I changed my philosophy: I began to pull air into me by pushing my body out into the world. I would pull my diaphragm down, push out my belly, and expand my chest, inhaling through my nose. I imagined my body stretching out into the landscape. My tailbone rooting down into the ground, And the crown of my head reaches toward the stars, my fingers and toes stretch in every direction. I tried to make my body fill as much space as possible. Then, I would exhale very slowly. Every day I focused on repeating this simple action for at least an hour. Gradually the knot disappeared and I feel so much better now. I will never forget to breathe for so long again.
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Endless Rhine II, 2016.
There is an ancient legend about a koi, a koi that swam all the way up the Yellow River. As a reward, the gods turn this lucky fish into a dragon. But this isn't the Yellow River, it's the Rhine, though it sure does seem like it keeps going on and on forever. Eventually I’d get bored of swimming up a river like this one. I guess I’ll never become a dragon.
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Don't Trust What You See Here
One morning I was gardening in New England when my friend Toby stopped by on his way to work. He was restoring the local church’s steeple and he asked me if I’d like to see the work he was doing… Interested, I went inside to put my contact lenses in, and forgot I had just been handling some very very hot peppers. We then jumped into Toby’s convertible and sped off to the church, the crisp air digging deep into my already inflamed eyeballs. Following the climb up the 200-foot steeple’s maze like interior, full of dust and 150 years of pigeon shit, my eyes were streaming tears. I got to the top and peered out the small window, but I couldn’t see the beautiful vista, because my eyes could barely open.
On another morning years later, as I was waking up in a hotel in the Caribbean, I noticed that I was paralyzed. I could see the room around me and hear my friend Marc snoring in the next bed, but I couldn’t move my body. Instead I saw a pitch-black figure, an incubus, standing above me. It was the first time I dealt with sleep paralysis, though I’ve experienced it several times since… Sometime the figure that visits me is frightening, other times it is calming. Scientists can offer convincing reasons for this phenomenon and the accompanying hallucinations: only parts of my brain wake up, while others remain in a dreaming state.
These are two instances when my body and my brain failed me (though I’m blessed to be a relatively healthy person). These failures, however, were profound experiences. Because these moments are when I felt my physical and psychological limits most acutely and I understood so clearly that there is much in this world that I can make sense or understand. I’ve grown more comfortable within this space sense, and I found failure to be a fruitful place to make art.
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Right-side Up, Upside Down, Left, Right, and Wrong, 2019.
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OS X Yosemite Desktop Smeared with Oil, lightbox, 2015.
I upgraded my operating system again, and suddenly a beautiful and pure Western landscape was staring back at me. A change from the big cats I’d gotten used to—Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion. I guess they’d run out of cats, because now it was suddenly Yosemite. I poured oil all over this beautiful and overly clean landscape, and a rainbow appeared. I’d spent a pot of gold on this damn machine, after all.
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