For over 30 years I’ve been documenting the overlooked landscapes and man-made artifacts of everyday life. I’ve photographed with a curiosity for what these scenes tell us about the culture that we live in, and with the hope that my imagery will encourage the viewer to look at their world with a new appreciation for the significance of the typically unnoticed.
In 1999, with the capabilities provided by digital photography, I began to work with multiple images printed in grids; images that could be something painted on a wall, a derelict sign, or a praying mantis on a shirt sleeve; in short just about anything. While assembling images for the resulting series, “Artifacts”, I noticed that some vertical pairings stood out; they had charisma. It was hard to forget these compelling twosomes, so for the next series I sought more of these pairings. The resulting series “Dyads” introduced, and the current work “Dyads II” revisits, the approach.
Together the paired images create something that was not suggested by a single scene alone, and certainly not anticipated when either was shot. Many analogies come to mind. I think about two people in a couple, two voices in a duet, or two dishes comprising a meal. And there’s a formalist impulse at work here too: colors and shapes playing off each other; tangents continued. Sometimes symbols and metaphors are juxtaposed. But the main question for a given composition is, does it work visually.
My hope is to create something unexpected that speaks to the viewer in a way that either image alone, or indeed any single image, can’t.