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Philosophy
Photography has always seemed magical to me, and on good days the chance configurations of animate and inanimate things in time and space seem miraculous and endlessly worthy of capture and preservation. There is no difference between beautiful and ugly, on those days. It is existence itself and how the mindless dance of atoms creates what looks like order that are to be celebrated. This is how I understand William Eggleston’s “democratic camera”, and he and John Gossage (in several ways Eggleston’s disciple) are my photoheros. But not all days are good and not everyone sees the same (or any) miracles in the mundane, so I do pay attention to composition and what seem to me semiotically rich everyday subject matters, and am developing series around certain themes – business parks, the sad arrangements of drab furniture in restaurants, hotels and offices, statuary and stuffed animals in museums, and trees (especially trees in distress). Only the last two subjects connect even remotely to my life in science, but in both science and art I struggle to be deconstructive, in a polite way.