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.
I see familiar surroundings cinematically, 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, 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. What remains outside the frame is as much a part of the image as what I choose to include.
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.
I am present in what I choose to preserve, and perhaps more so in what I leave out.
Time has made records of loss out of images I made for other reasons.
I keep making photographs without knowing everything they will become.