My father took up residence in a senior care home in Florida in 1996. It was a big, but necessary, change to his lifestyle. I made this photograph during his first hours there. To this day, I wonder what was going through his mind at that moment. Was it the realization that this was going to be his last chapter?
Turning 80, I was at a crossroads in my life. There was most certainly more behind me than ahead. I felt the need to organize a retrospective of a lifetime of work as well as introduce new images. Inspiration had not left me.
I could feel an energy in the landscape that day and it may have been in the scale of that vista and the orchestrated movements of grass created by the wind. There is no end to the road.
The COVID-19 pandemic gave me time to re-examine my career in photography.
I looked at what I had done professionally – much of my assigned work was in architectural photography. And I also looked at my personal work, the captured moments of people, places, and things spanning decades. It was my creative life flashing before me.
Each image has a story to go with it. In the earlier work, the story could include the pre-digital technical aspect of making the image. The process may have used different tools – film, darkrooms, equipment. Working digitally with the same elements of light, composition, texture, the end result is the same – a photograph with the creative vision of the moment.
And that vision could be in something as mundane as a jar of preserved peppers which caught my eye while I was cat sitting for friends. This was taken with an iPhone. The light is from the refrigerator.
Some photographs are intended to document what is in front of the camera while others are interpretations by the photographer. I wish to go beyond the documentary, to explore the visual language that brings forth the emotions of the photographer into the finished image. I provide the beginnings of a story, and I want the viewer to complete it.
Finding the photograph is an intuitive process for me. I will scout an area looking for something interesting. When I find a subject that feels right, I select the point of view and photograph it.
My post-production process is heuristic, and I love this discovery process. I make technical adjustments both globally and locally within the image, using optical distortion, color, contrast, and exposure. The final composition is much like when a sculpture is finished – reducing and eliminating all the unnecessary elements and in the process revealing the vision that I saw in the first place.
This is how I approach any subject, whether it’s a nightscape, a detail, a portrait, an architectural structure, or something in nature. My intuition and curiosity guide me to the heart of the story.