Photographs can be found anywhere. My challenge is to notice. For years, I walked underneath utility wires, blind to a world that existed a few feet above my head. An eyesore, an obstruction to the view that lay beyond, I learned to look through the wires and make them invisible. Slowly, a shift occurred in my vision. The background fell away and those wires came into crisp focus. I began to see the patterns of random geometry that they created. The city divided into parallelograms and triangles introduced a visual element previously ignored. I am drawn to make order out of their chaos, to draw attention to the simple forms and basic elements of line and shape.

At the same time, I began to use a Holga camera. Essentially a pinhole camera, this crude, plastic toy camera forced me to abandon the technical aspects that I had valued in my earlier work and focus simply on composition. An element of serendipity and chance is introduced into my work. Using the Holga negatives as the basis of a multi-step process involving both digital and handcrafted printing processes, I arrive at the final result of a cyanotype or gelatin silver print. By utilizing a printing process that is over 100 years old, I deny myself the tempting pursuit of technical perfection in exchange for an additional element of chance in the process.

In the end, I am many steps removed from the nascent image. Whether these photographs evoke artifacts of modernity that one would rather ignore or draw another into a sky-gazing walk is up to the viewer. The success of the photographs hinges upon their ability to present the familiar landscape anew.

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