Artist Statement
I photograph because we can't trust memory to hold what we saw. The eyes only work on the instant. Once you leave a place, an encounter, an event, it is gone, and there is no way back to it except through a photographic record. One photograph shows one view, so I photograph many views. I have twenty years of travel and tens of thousands of photographs of the same places and the same moments.
I layer my photographs because two decades of movie editing taught me that a new meaning emerges from the combination of shots, an idea that happens in the mind of the person watching. The individual shots carry content but not meaning. They are the base of a mental construction in a linear sequence. With my photography, I collapse the line into one frame, so the connection happens at once.
I choose precisely which images to layer from what I remember when I think of a subject, a place, a monument, a person, and I merge them. What comes out is not a view an eye could see. It is a recollection. I give the substance, and the viewer completes the meaning from what they carry. Emotions, recognition of places, feelings are theirs.
At fairs people guess what the work shows. Sometimes they are right. Sometimes they are wrong in a way that interests me more. A woman looked at Basilica di San Marco and said Moscow. She was not failing to see. She was reconstructing the image from what she carries, and what came back was hers.
Recognition does not need a correct view. It needs experience.
