Photography

Here are some selected images from recent projects, some of which are quite new and still in progress. Click on the image to see it full size. To learn more, please contact me at the bottom of this page.

LIVES OF THE SAINTS

FOR BOYS

Lives of the Saints for Boys is an intimate series of portraits, combining photography and text, which depicts both the spiritual and material world. This new work-in-progress incorporates portraits, figure studies, nudes, still lifes, and poetic autobiographical essays. Moving between the realms of exterior and interior, this project looks at men at not only as figures of impassive strength, but also as figures of vulnerability, sensuality and desirability, or, more-often-than-not, an uneasy complex union of these qualities.  

Inspired by Italian and Spanish Baroque painting, particularly the works of Caravaggio, Zurbarán, and di Rebera, Lives of the Saints for Boys embraces the language of theatrical extremes, often approaching the operatic, in which dramatic contrasts between light and dark or sumptuous color and deep blackness are used, without camp or irony, to dramatize, elevate and honor the call of human longing - the elusive demands of desire. 

Lives of the Saints for Boys adopts the visual and verbal rhetoric of devotional painting and poetry, in which the desire to be consumed by the Divine, through ecstasy or suffering, or both, is experienced and expressed directly through the body. Desire acts upon, incarnates, and transforms the body. In images and words, Lives of the Saints for Boys unexpectedly places this rhetoric squarely in the center of gay identity to look anew at the meanings and riddles of masculinity and desire.  As powerful attempts continue being made to label that desire as disordered, destructive, deadly and ugly, Lives of the Saints for Boys seeks to champion and complicate that desire as profound, spiritual, beautiful, and, above all, human.

The CORRIDOR

This project is a work-in-progress whose contours are only just beginning to become clear. It seems like it’s going to be an exploration of liminal space and memory.

SOngs of disaster and forgiveness

Songs of Disaster and Forgiveness is a series of black and white images encompassing still life, found images and text, and urban landscape.  Shot on monochrome instant film with a toy Instax mini camera, the images are scanned and then lightly edited.  Each image is quite small, approximately 3” x 5”, and is printed on 13”x 18” paper where it hovers over an expanse of white. Many images are double exposures, embracing chance and intuition, treading the thin line between anticipation and failure, embracing and releasing.  The images exist in a realm of suspended time, dream time. Not unlike the experience of grief, the images inhabit the fraying seam which binds remembrance to forgetting.   Fragments of words and phrases, found in poetry, letters, song lyrics, and art books, are also included as separate images. They, themselves, seem half-recalled, as if overheard from a room very far away.  Words and images whisper to each other, telling a story that presses near even as it can’t quite be grasped: incomplete and forever on the verge of disappearing.

If NOT, WINTER

This project is an ongoing experiment. By using a plastic lens from a Holga toy camera on a powerful Canon DSLR, and circumventing digital perfection, these images live in the cracks and overlooked. They rely on the act of surrender and an openness to mistakes in order to return the simplest process of capturing an image: trying to choose well and then push one button.