June 6, 2025
“In the quiet interplay of light and shadow, amidst the stark simplicity of form, lies the power of minimalistic photography to evoke profound emotions within the viewer. Each frame captures a fleeting moment, distilling the essence of human experience into its purest elements.”
In the past when someone would ask me, “What drew you to photograph that?” or “Why did you photograph it that way?” I would simply say that it was the way I saw the subject. For a long time, it seemed like a simple question that needed a simple answer. But as I’ve matured as an artist, the answer has often been beyond the power of words to describe. For me, my photographs reflect feelings I have about the subject and how I want to express and share them with the viewer.
I just love everything about photography. The actual capture of the image, the processing, the printing, the mounting: these are all time-consuming steps in the final expression of the my vision, and they are all extremely enjoyable. I take pleasure in every phase as I move closer to the final print, each step connecting me again with the subject and with my feelings for it. What makes a photograph powerful is the sense it gives the viewer that the photographer cared passionately and intensely about his subject, about the way that he saw it, and about every detail of the final print.
This image, “Winter Grass,” is a roadside scene that I had passed several times before. I always thought that it looked interesting, but somehow I never had the time to go back to it and make a photograph; I was always hurrying home from photographing somewhere else. This time, however, I was heading to a place in central Oregon to photograph and snow had closed the roads to where I wanted to go, so I thought about finally going back to spend some time with the grass. The way the winds had sculpted the grass, the angle of the fence, and the tones of the image gave me goose bumps then, and I still get them now.
I can’t think of anything I would rather do, or of anything that brings me more satisfaction than this journey from the viewfinder to the final print that I hold in my hands, expressing my personal response to nature’s beauty.
April 13, 2025
“There exists in the seeing of nature, in any seeing, a delicate balance between the chaos of ignorance with its gift of freshness, and the order of knowledge, with its curse of restricted vision. All attempts to understand seeing involve, to some extent, the discussion of order and chaos, with their associated gifts and evils.”
Steven Meyers, On Seeing Nature
I can’t tell you how many times I have gone out to photograph with a sense of excitement accompanied by a sense of fear. Not a fear of the elements or environment but more a fear of seeing. A fear that it has all been done before and probably better, and what can I do to see things differently, illustrating my way or perhaps my style of seeing and ultimately printing.
What the world doesn't need is more of the same landscape photographs we have had for over a hundred and sixty years. But how can a photographer go to a familiar or famous location and create something new, something to inspire a fresh vision? The natural tendency for me is to start to repeat what I have had success with before, with the result that things start to look the same.
Lately I have tried to spend more time with a scene, to take more time to sense what it is that actually told me that something here has triggered a response. I try to take the time to follow those feelings and respond in a sensitive way, to enjoy the sense of freshness of my discovery in a unique, individual style that I have invested time, emotion, and thought into. It might look like a tree or a rock, but it is my tree or my rock, seen only as I saw it at that moment using my internal vision. Sometimes it can be a matter of excluding unrelated information from a scene, or including information about the sense of place and light.
It is the exquisite tension of being in a place physically and experiencing the beauty and the sublime, independent of intellectual understanding to a large extent. Photography lies in the gift of immediate perception, of feeling and not of intellectualizing it. That will come later when we engage with a viewer.
