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The Children Shall Inherit The Earth
20" x 24"
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Artist Statement: I have always loved to hunt with a camera using perception and intuition in an attempt to see beyond
appearances into minute cracks in the hard concrete of reality that reveal little ironies, odd juxtapositions
and hidden truths. A favorite hunting ground is the fault zone along the nexus of culture and nature
where balance is attained or sacrificed.
Following intuition often leads to discoveries that further spark the imagination. Consequently, I've often
found myself wanting to continue beyond the definitive moment of the single image to construct further
comments, ferret out incongruities and develop new histories. This desire to extend the captured moment
led me to work with alternate darkroom techniques and slide sandwiching in the sixties, multiple enlarger
printing and slide duplication techniques in early seventies and slide animation stand imaging from the late
seventies into the eighties. By the early nineties the digital darkroom of the computer had become a
precise and powerful tool to enhance imagery and to seamlessly edit composite parts into a whole. This
allows me to work within the image to synthesize backgrounds and parts from a variety of sources.
The computer's electronic darkroom has made imagery paintable, distortable, and so precisely
compositable that photographic reality will never be the same. I believe that this ability to continue to
exercise the visual imagination, to expand the narration of the story, is the digital world's key gift to
photography and creates a paradigm shift into a new modus operandi for photography. From 1/2000 of a
second in a camera an image can be given directional changes for years through the computer.
Within the old paradigm, the photographer is seeing and sensing the things he is after; but with the digital
construction paradigm he is imagining and orchestrating the scene he is after. Now a series of moments
excised from the flow of time can be arranged for the development of the artist's fiction. A narrative
develops that arranges, connects and comments on the moments utilizing changed or added objects as
well as changed or added actions and reactions by the 'cast'.
My work bridges the perception of the hunt with the conception of construction. The production of this
kind of imagery is run by internal time lines, guided by personal concerns, formed by the imagination, and
leads to the creation of images not quite seen before.
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