Hinterlands Statement
The tradition of landscape photography is shrouded in mystique and pervaded by the legacy of celebrated photographers. In practice, however, once the image has been composed, the medium and the photographer both are subject to the transitory ebb and flow of light and time. When this tide, this flux of inconsistencies aligns, it is then that the photographer must seize the moment, and only then, can the evidence of this quintessence be engrained. This instant, engrained as a negative, becomes the vessel that allows the photographer to communicate a narrative in the form of a finished print.
Interestingly, landscape photography for me was originally peripheral. Yet as an accomplished photographer and an ardent outdoorsman the conditions for our entanglement could not have been more favorable. Half a decade ago as I continued to transverse the American West my ambitions of photographing the landscapes I bore witness to began to take root.
Much to my dismay the fleeting quintessence I sought to capture often failed to manifest despite my perseverance and presence. My camera, it seemed, was condemned to a dry-sack deep within my backpack. It soon became decidedly obvious that the light was always too harsh or too flat, the vistas too often obscured, and the skies either too devoid of character or too muddled with clouds. Patience rewards those who wait, and however infrequently, I soon found that I was often in the right place at the right time.
The photographs before you are a cross-section of my travels throughout the American West and my attempts to encapsulate the fleeting quintessence I stood witness to. I invite you to take a moment to journey through these hinterlands and hope you too will find that the narratives express the uninhibited grandeur of the Western landscape.
Streetward Statement
During the twentieth century the tradition of street photography materialized as an idiosyncratic way of seeing. Coupled with the emergence of the miniature camera, or Leica, a visual rhetoric was rigorously established that broke with esteemed compositional theory, textbook camera technique, and regarded the camera as the sole cropping apparatus. The street photographer employs the camera as an extension of the self and in doing so fashions a visual chronicle of subsequent rovings. In pursuit of the image the street unfolds before the photographer’s gaze as a circus where nonsensical phenomena and fleeting scenarios abound. The street photographer must then recognize the ‘decisive moment’ within this proliferation of quotidian happenstance and seize the image prior to its imminent disappearance.
‘Streetward’ as the adjective of the word ‘street’ is used as a title to further recount my personal photographic wanderings. The photographs exhibited here, a fraction of a more comprehensive street photography oeuvre, represent a synopsis of my contemporary work, and are moreover presented as fragments of my own visual chronicle specific to the distinctive insight of how the street unfolds before my gaze.