I think of photographs as fossils, impressions left by encounters, preserving the shape of something that is no longer there.
Often something simply catches my attention, and I want a picture of it.
Understanding why can come later, sometimes much later.
I see familiar surroundings as fragments of a story already underway.
An ordinary scene can become strange, intimate, or faintly absurd.
I am drawn to that uncertainty, to the pleasure of looking without knowing, and to the possibility that something ordinary might reveal itself as something else.
There is a kind of voyeurism in this looking.
I photograph people, places, and objects with an affection that sometimes borders on aggression.
To make a photograph is to select, isolate, and possess something briefly.
I am interested in how photographs change as the distance between the image and its making grows.
I return to them for information and feeling, though neither can give me the full experience back.
What I remember enters into what I see,
and what I see becomes part of how I remember.
Sometimes I recognize something in an image that I did not know was there.
Sometimes I recognize something that is no longer there.
The photograph has not changed, but the person looking at it has.
Time can expose what I could not recognize before.
I am present in what I choose to take,
and perhaps more so in what I leave behind.
Time has made records of loss out of images I have made for other reasons.
I keep making photographs without knowing everything they will become.