 |
|
|
 |
 |
|
|
| |
My relationship to the photograph began when I realized the power behind making a moment static – to catalog it, to hold onto it, to use it in a search for clues to the mysteries of, if not existence, then at least the potential meaning and significance behind everyday events. Regardless of how much theory I read or the depth of my understanding as to the mechanics of the medium, this one fact still mesmerizes and vexes me. It is as if the photograph is a phenomenological hiccup with a lure that can be circled, but not wholly identified. The only solution for me is to continue making photographs as if this riddle of the image and how the image translates the nature of existence into physical form can be pieced together in some kind of abstract puzzle, sure it will be missing pieces, but eventually the picture will come into vague view.
Flannery O’Connor has said that “the kind of vision that the fiction writer needs to have or develop, in order to increase the meaning of his story is called anagogical vision, and that is the kind of vision that is able to see different levels of reality in one image or one situation.” Each photograph for me is an attempt to tease out the threads that make up the fabric of existence or at least admire their physical form up close for some moments longer than the flow of life generally allows.
I am interested in making photographs that inhabit the same psychological space as fiction and act as markers along the continuum of our/my experience of life. I am able to do this best in my native land, North Carolina. The photographs that I make there are not just about the players or the stage of the landscape, but about how the two are inextricably linked; how one is born out of the other. Over the years I have looked to the work of a few photographers like William Eggleston and Sally Mann for guidance on how to achieve the tone that I am interested in having in the stories that my photographs tell, but also and possibly more significantly have been the words and images that fiction writers like O’Connor or Zora Neale Hurston are able to conjure up like eddies of so much dust that swirl magically then fall back to insignificant particles on the ground.
The photograph is the perfect container to permit a real world referent to point to various meanings and possibilities of meaning all at once while also holding the viewer’s attention as a physical document of beauty. It both confounds truth and alludes to it at the same moment. The photograph is its own split-second of truth, one that I intend to chase even if the chase is never-ending.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
