In this work, I seek a “depth of time”, which extends beyond personal experience and the specifics of place by combining the natural with the unnatural to produce multi-layered “memories” of human connections and intersections with nature.

For twenty-five years, I have been photographing extensively in the Laguna Coastal Wilderness, a unique, controversial, and endangered natural environment in the southern portion of development-prone Orange County, CA. In an effort to address change and incorporate the passage of time, I began compositing images together in 1997 that I had made over several decades of shooting. I used labor-intensive hand techniques, often combining ten to twenty images to make one-of-a-kind 16 x 20 inch Ilfochrome color prints. As the work developed, I felt the need to add other layers of context to explore concerns about purity, beauty, natural process, time, change, distance, memory, and the effects of human incursion upon nature. This led to the Points of View series, which references balance in life with six pieces that are about “Inbalance” and six that are about “Imbalance”.

Throughout the series, I use the purity of light and color to reference the essence of life. Color fields are created for each of the six colors of light by painting with light on Ilfochrome paper. To extend the documentation beyond the lens-based photograph, I collect artifacts, such as leaves, tire treads, and lake water at the locations where I shoot the camera-images. These elements, along with the color fields and the Ilfochrome composite prints, are subsequently scanned and then combined digitally. Each element in the 30x22 inch pieces is printed the same size as it existed prior to its inclusion in the final print.

Once the prints are made, a hand-written, free-form, non-linear text, peppered with references from the past and present, is added to each piece to extend the layers of dialogue and to evoke a more personalized sense of memory. Contextually and visually, the text functions as a background and given the hand application, the inclusion of the text insures that no two pieces in the edition will ever be exactly alike.