About the series

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This series explores the Mysteries hidden in everyday objects.  We walk past them every day– ordinary stairs, trees, machines, telephone wires, walls, and such. But in odd moments when the light falls just so, or when you happen to see it in just the right way, a Mystery is revealed.  Gone is the simple thing we know, and in its place is a portentous relic, a touchstone, a gate-keeper, or the symbol of some great unknown.

 

These Mysteries are all around us.  Hidden in plain sight, they lie waiting.  We must go within.  Slipping through, like entering a water droplet, we enter a universe inside.  Venerable, inscrutable, wizened, and contemplative.  Weightless gravitas, effortless age, poetry in repose…

 

To help find these Mysteries, I pare down the image to its core essence.  I abstract away the familiar and the easily-recognizable by composing the image to only include certain features, removing them from the larger context.  I keep the scale and spatial orientation ambiguous, and in the tradition of Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, I use a flattened two-dimensional space to further distinguish the world of the photograph from our ordinary world.

 

I am drawn to images that carry a certain meditative quality.  Part of this is achieved by using a sparse language of geometrical shapes, lines, and rhythms.  Many of the compositions use rectangles and straight lines, contributing to a feeling of solidity, balance, and graceful poise, without being unduly weighted down and cumbersome.  Furthermore, I use a narrow tonal range, so that the images are either overall dark or overall light, resulting in images that are contemplative, rather than emphatically assertive.

 

The literal subject matter takes a secondary role in my photographs, allowing our associations to come to the forefront.  We leave behind the question “What is it”, and as with the Equivalents of Alfred Stieglitz, the images transcend their subject matter to symbolize something else.  The profane is merged with the sacred, and the mundane is transformed into the mysterious.

 

I created these photographs using a Hasselblad 205FCC camera, and Fuji Neopan 100 film. The original photographs were printed in the darkroom, though current prints are archival pigment prints on Hahnemuehle PhotoRag paper. Prints are available at 12” x 12”, 20” x 20”, 40” x 40”, and 58” x 58”.