My photography examines the systems and cultural assumptions of modern life, attempting to unveil new discourses that will force fictive possibilities for interpretation on my viewers. I seek a mythic exploration of self and identity in a world increasingly monopolized by corporate media with pro-corporate, conservative agendas. Freed from conventional aesthetic commitments, I attempt to achieve a more pointed reflection on the latent meaning inherent in urban life by developing a formal language consonant with societal conceptual motives, but one through which I remain defiantly human. In recent years I’ve moved from a referent that necessitated an accommodation between the mind and the eye in a Cubist oscillation of planes containing different element-fields toward a kinetic flux that elucidates the existence-density of things by means of a splintering of viewpoints and perspective.

I also enjoy writing overblown artist’s statements obfuscated with linguistic complexification to see who will actually wade through such baloney. The above was actually intended to challenge the obscure narratives and self-absorption promoted by museum curators and those who think that such tortured language sounds intelligent.

I realize that posting this probably precludes my being recruited by the academy of art that sits across the street from where I live. A guide to writing the artist’s statement tells me that it is absolutely essential and that I should probably hire a professional writer – preferably one with an art background – to prepare this “intensely personal” work for me. The guide goes on for a couple pages without really explaining why the statement is essential. I’m pretty sure I know the answer. I’ve had prints in a few exhibitions, and have had to reluctantly produce something for people to read while they wait for their wine. No, the guide says, the why, for a photographer, must address why you take pictures. I would have thought that Garry Winogrand, famous street photographer of the 1960s, would have paved the way for any future photographer to merely invoke the Winogrand response: “to see what things look like when photographed.” But alas, modern art history appears not to accept Winogrand at face value, the Cleveland Museum of Art’s judgment being that he was “notoriously avoiding self-explanation.” Vladimir Mayakovsky (“art is not a mirror; it is a hammer” – also attributed to Bertoldt Brecht) would no doubt conclude that Winogrand was shirking his responsibility to maximize social impact as an artist. But comrade Mayakovsky just may have been another blowhard. Furthermore, it may well be that Winogrand’s art has hammered reality without merely reflecting it, despite the fact that he never declared that to be his purpose.

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