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widely exhibited works
In my Puddle Scape series, I seek a new perspective on NYC's ramshackle beauty by combining the texture of rough-hewn streets and the found geometry of traffic markings with crystalline puddle reflections of the city's high-energy inhabitants and vertical architecture amid deep blue skies. In "Blastoff," for instance, I use the curving rusty curb at left and the crosswalk fragment at right as leading lines to draw attention to an upsurging apartment building with its distinctive green and white speckled facade. To my eyes, the building appears either to be blasting skyward from its well-worn asphalt foundations or descending disturbingly into rising silty waters. In "Flatiron Crossing," taken near the landmark Flatiron Building, a silhouetted figure seems fleeting, perhaps dissolving, amid a multi-layered surface where ground and sky, crosswalk and buildings, intermingle amid hazy water. This photo exemplifies a collage-like effect I strive for in many puddle shots, and in doing so, evokes the city's many layers of history and population and life--unruly, overcrowded, jumbled, but still vivid and compelling--and, hopefully, persisting.
Puddle Scapes
In my mother's latter years, as her health declined, I visited her as often as possible in San Francisco, the city where I'd grown up. In the afternoons, when she would nap, I'd head out with my camera to revisit my childhood haunts. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the intimate human reason for my visits, I ended up taking photos primarily of buildings, instead of interactions of people. There was something about the quality of light in the afternoons, when the fog had lifted and the sky was a crisp blue, that lit the city's homes in a way that felt striking and complicated and emotional. And, as I look back at these photos ("In the Avenues: After Hopper" and "Clay Street at Dusk"), I can clearly see my mother's influence--she was an artist and she taught me, by instruction and example, to understand composition and color and line, and to perceive how changes in the quality of light could contain a melancholy tone, which I feel in these two photos, though no human is present.
San Francisco
In searching for unseen beauty in my disheveled city, I have repeatedly found it in the unlikely location of delivery truck exteriors. In "Delivery Truck Abstract: After Klee." a colorful canvas blossoms on the rear of a truck, from graffiti remnants and over-scrubbed siding blotches, within a surface organized by a vertical line of bolts and horizontal panel separations. As I shot this, the swatches of red and green, divided by a subtle grid of irregular lines, reminded me of Paul Klee's abstract paintings. "Delivery Truck Abstract: Celestial Orbs," too, is an image found on the exterior wall of a New York truck. In this case, the erosion of the original surface has yielded black and white shapes that have an organic quality suggesting a rotting tree, and meanwhile, the large and small blackened circles resemble a moon circling a planet.
Delivery Truck Abstracts
These photos belong to a series I call "building patterns," in which I frame portions of adjacent New York buildings in what I hope is a pleasing semi-abstract arrangement of shapes. In "Building Pattern: Earth Tones," light and shadow help to delineate polygons that resemble, and contrast with, each other, in angle, size, and structure. My aim is for the image to represent the 3D quirks of NYC apartment buildings, while simultaneously presenting a 2D configuration comparable to a child's geometric puzzle. "Building Pattern: Touches of Green," by contrast, features office buildings and emphasizes the city's verticality. The image is less jagged than its counterpart, unified by the repetition of white facades, touches of green in several structures, and a framing by older towers. But it too represents an abstracted view of urban landscape influenced by the work of such painters as Charles Sheeler and Joseph Stella.
Building Patterns