"O Nature, and O soul of man!
​how far beyond utterance are your linked analogies; 
not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter,
but has its cunning duplicate in mind."

- Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Prospect Park
I lived near Prospect Park when I was in Brooklyn, and the more I visited the more interested I became in the strange things I'd see or find there.   That began a daily photo exercise that lasted for two years.  Each day I'd wander the park for an hour or two or three and document what I found.  That led to several years of on-and-off editing and arranging of the several thousand photos I had taken.  This set of photos is the result.

"A traveler enters the world into which he travels,
​but a tourist brings his own world with him
​and never sees the one he's in."

- Thomas H. Cook

Tourist
These images were taken with my trusty Mamiya 6, a now discontinued collapsible camera that took square photos.  I liked it especially because I could hide it under my jacket or shirt, and then quickly snap an image without my subject being aware.  I took these over several years in a number of tourist spots.  Inevitably I found myself interested in the tourist themselves more than the place they were in, and in how they played a role in larger scene that they were unconsciously a part of.   Another nickname for this project is "Little People, Big Landscapes".

"A desert is a place without expectation."

- Nadine Gordimer

Desert Polaroids
One of my favorite cameras I ever owned was the Polaroid SX-70.  I used it on a trip through the Southwest, going through dozens of packs of that wonderful instant film.  The SX-70 film has a dreamy quality, and the color is painterly and saturated.  I still mourn the loss of that camera, although there's an app on my phone that imitates the look!  After my trip I paired up images that made sense to me, and the quality of the Polaroid somehow reflected the strange and beautiful desert environs that I'd travelled through.


"It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.”

- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Photo-
​Sculptures
I began creating these photo/sculpture hybrids as my thesis project for my MFA, way back in 1995.  I invented a process that allowed me to take images of a persons head in pieces, create polaroids from those images, and then attach those polaroids like a skin onto a cast I had made of the person.  I was interested in how both photography and casting could capture very fine detail, and in how combining the two resulted in a strange record of that person's presence.  Nowadays you can go get something similar done at special shops, where they have a very elaborate photo system to capture a person in 3D, and then a 3D printer that will create a tiny sculpture of you.  Personally, I think these are a bit more interesting, although admittedly creepier.