Artist Statement:
I am a photographer who is both fascinated and frustrated by the abstraction of Image – making. Freezing a moment in time and space, framing it, giving it importance over the endless flow of moments, and making meaning from what is sometimes incomprehensible, I hope to create a coherent record of the dynamic exchange between the photographer (myself), the moment in the world and the image being made.
When I first approached the elemental force of this vast waterfall, I felt compelled to capture the experience in its entirety, to freeze the immensity of the waterfall in the mind. And yet, as I tried to suspend the moment, I recognized that it would become an increasingly fixed concept, something solidified and separate, no longer an ever- changing reality. With perception, the mind so easily assumes that when something is named, it has been understood, and then a deeper exploration of the experience is arrested.
When I first approached the elemental force of this vast waterfall, I felt compelled to capture the experience in its entirety, to freeze the immensity of the waterfall in the mind. And yet, as I tried to suspend the moment, I recognized that it would become an increasingly fixed concept, something solidified and separate, no longer an ever- changing reality. With perception, the mind so easily assumes that when something is named, it has been understood, and then a deeper exploration of the experience is arrested.
As I started to move closer and closer, nearer to the sounds and rising mist of the rushing waters – to become intimate with the experience by feeling the cold icy texture, the wet smoothness, the experience of knowing water became immediate. I became immersed, desiring to merge into this ‘knowing’. Thus the camera became a means to become intimate with what could not ever be seen with the naked eye as the water was constantly changing and evolving into new shapes. In the second the camera’s shutter froze the moment’s event, the water’s capacity to change and shift shape was revealed in astonishing detail beyond the eye’s and mind’s capacity to perceive, and yet ironically, that very moment captured and revealed had already disappeared forever, never to manifest in precisely the same way again. The photograph not only offered a moment’s delight, but also the intense realization and disappointment that the experience’s impermanent reality could never be captured with the camera.
My photographs are not self-expression, nor do they carry a message. They are simply the embodied result of my interactions with my surroundings. This is an “immersive” process, using the camera as a vehicle to engage in an active response to the encounter with the phenomenon of the rushing water. These photographs reveal the dynamic exchange between the photographer, the moment in the world, and the image being created.
My photographs are not self-expression, nor do they carry a message. They are simply the embodied result of my interactions with my surroundings. This is an “immersive” process, using the camera as a vehicle to engage in an active response to the encounter with the phenomenon of the rushing water. These photographs reveal the dynamic exchange between the photographer, the moment in the world, and the image being created.