I began my photographic journey when I was twelve years old. That was when I first fell in love with photography. My mother was an avid antique collector, she loved to go into the little shops that sold old furniture and nick-nacks and browse for hours. She would often take me on these outings with her and this became our special time together. Sometimes she would purchase a special piece of dinner ware or furniture and others times we would just look at the beautiful objects the store owner had out on display,
One day my mother and I where traveling into the city which was about an hour away. We were going to an antique store in the Brookside neighborhood of Kansas City, a place I would later move to in my twenties. She parked the car a few blocks from the store and we started to walk down the sidewalk. This was a very nice residential neighborhood with many shops in the central area, in fact there were more than one antique store in this small area.
As we walked down the sidewalk there was one shop in particular that caught my eye. It was a camera store. I was intrigued by the cameras I saw through the window, they looked so interesting. I asked my mother if we could go into the camera store and look around after we were done antiquing. I’m sure my mother had no interest in cameras herself, but she was a gracious and loving woman who would do almost anything for her children, so of course she agreed.
That first trip to the camera shop is were my love of photography began. I was in awe of the mechanical intricacy and the beautiful design of the cameras and lenses. I spent quite a bit of time looking at the different models and asking the store clerk questions about how the cameras worked. I didn’t get a camera that day, that would happen later that year at Christmas, but I did start to study photography. I subscribed to the magazine “Popular Photography” and even checked out some books from the library. My photographic journey had begun.
My first photograph that I ever took was abstract, it was a photo of a fireplace with a fire burning in it. I focused on the fire screen, leaving the flames to be a blurred orange color. Years before digital photography was even invented this images resembled pixelated squares of a low resolution image.
The photographs I take for myself are a way for me to find beauty in the world around me, wether that is someplace obvious, like the flowers in my backyard or someplace not so obvious, like a rusty bucket in a junkyard. I don’t place more value on an object that is traditionally considered beautiful over one that is seen by most as being ugly, I can find the beauty in both extremes. So on photo days, the days that I intentionally go out and use my camera, I am constantly looking for pieces of the world to take back with me. It is my catalogue of the world as it passes by me while I am living my life.
My artistic influences have always been very diverse, ranging from the masters of photography that I grew up revering to the titans of the abstract expressionist movement of the 1950’s. When I was cutting my teeth on photography techniques I was looking to Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter and Paul Caponigro. In art school I became very interested in the work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Arshile Gorky, among others.
Image making is something I enjoy, the thrill of finding a scene that interests me, capturing it as an image file and then making adjustments to create a photograph I can be proud of is the reason I keep doing this work.
This work at its most basic is about seeing the world in a way that everything is relevant, everything is interesting and there is potential for beauty everywhere. The goal is to use the camera to capture images in such a way as to make connections between otherwise dispirit subjects, creating a visual democracy where everything is worthy of attention and every once overlooked object can be seen as “beautiful”.
William Eggleston once produced a series of images in a project he called “The Democratic Forest”, a theme which I have borrowed heavily for my own project.