On Still Life

Ironically, my summers can be my busiest time of year for both editing and working on my website, even though I am not teaching. My energy is less diffused than during the semester, and it is possible to reflect on ongoing projects, begin new ones, and organize my work into something that kind of makes sense. Most of the time, when I am home, I shoot still life. My clients usually need their products photographed in color, while in fact, I strongly prefer black and white images of objects. To this end, much of the summer is being given over to creating a series of new black and white still life web pages. While clients need to see their products boldly and clearly presented, these black and white portfolios being created are strongly concerned with three things; light, contrast, and time. My personal reaction to shooting brand new sleek items for others, is to privately explore what happens to things after being used, before being completely assembled, discarded or just plain forgotten about.

The first of these portfolios to go up on the website has casually been referred to as "the Dark Page" for a number of months. The goal here has been to explore individual objects in isolation as if photographed in the middle of the night illuminated by actual moonlight. The two other black and white portfolios being put together are referred to, as of now, as the Gray Page, and the White Page. The conceptual concerns in both of these other pages are similar to the Dark Page, but the concerns around contrast and tonal ratios are somewhat different. All three of these black and white portfolios takes a slightly different tack on the concepts related to the passage of time, and impermanence. The three portfolios can be thought of as the of study of how the world reclaims itself from us.