Artist Statement
Photography has become a passion and obsession. I find myself always wanting to shoot people and portraits. I like the personable contact experience when working with individuals. As important as people are in my photographs they are not my only subjects in my images. I like to use light, natural and artificial to illuminate the mood and feelings my images portray. With light, I control everything. My portrait series is new and in the beginning stages of a body of work. Within this series I want my subjects to tell their own story for the audience to imagine.
Landscapes are usually the foundation and the beginnings of my work. I find myself shooting locations before adding people. Photography has also become a physical experience and exploration process for me. The physical experience of exploration is self-fulfilling. The motions of setting up a production set, the rhythmical movements in processing an image through chemicals in the darkroom, and the process of walking to and from a printer in the digital lab are consistent and are my source for comfort.
I want my audience that is not interested in art to look at my work and see something meaningful. For this reason, I enjoy shooting documentary work. Taking people in their life situations and expressing it as a photograph for people of all kinds to see is liberating for me. It shows honesty, a passion for exploration, and can even move from the world of art and into an inner self-discussion. This shows specifically in my Juarez, Mexico body of work. When photographing my Juarez series, my goal was to illustrate the fascinating lives these people live and to focus more on their accomplishments through hard work rather than showing their hardships in a negative way.
And most of all I want my photography to be visually intelligent. :)