About

I am a fine art photographer in northern Colorado creating images almost exclusively in black and white.  My subject is the landscape near the Wyoming border, a high plain with few deciduous trees and much scrub and sage, a land where the earth’s geologic bones often penetrate a nap of short prairie grass, revealing rocky structures sensuous and titanic.

Photographing this subtle terrain I’ve come to realize that what captures me is not its external beauty, but instead images from my own inner terrain that seem to recognize their corollary in the external world.  A reverse camera obscura. I’m convinced these images populate an unconscious both particular—my history, my emotions—and, I believe, universal.  My hope is that they invite you to bring to the light a dimly remembered or unarticulated part of yourself. 

The images are not a statement but the rising of a curtain.  Each presents the viewer with a question and invites, sometimes demands, a response.  In this sense the photographs are not about a rock or gully or tangle of rabbitbrush,  but instead are ambiguous and loaded.

What narratives do the rocks, grass, rare hidden springs offer? A recent project Rock Psalm invites us to explore and accept an eternal and immutable hidden order.  Wound, images from a jagged circle straddling the Wyoming state line, captures in mutilated stone two hundred years of mating, gun play, and murder.  Mystery, photographed in a Cheyenne sacred space, invites us to contemplate our inevitable death, and the sweetness and beauty of our fleeting life—a hairline scratch on the spectrum of deep time.  All these images are on the border.  All are on the border—between breath and stillness, generativity and destruction, life and death.

You will hear the influence of poet William Blake and writer Phillip Pullman in my philosophy: Blake’s celebration of flesh, word, and spirit, intertwined and inextricable;  Pullman, himself deeply influenced by Blake, in the fierce flouting of theology and celebration of a life fully and joyfully embodied and ending with the finality of our reabsorption by earth and sky.  

How do I work? Shooting in what’s called “civil dawn”—the magical but frustratingly narrow window of pre dawn light.  With digital camera and a single lens.  Coffee cooling in the thermos, high prairie rattlers still coiled and asleep.   I’m alone on my journey.  You’re there too.