ARTIST'S
STATEMENT
A photograph is a juxtaposition; a union of death and immortality, reality and fiction, memory and forgetting. Take this picture of me for example. It is staged, I placed myself and the camera to capture a certain effect. Whatever adjectives you might use to describe the woman in that photo, it is not how my friends see me. But it is still my reality, it is how I see myself. It is my representation.
"Ceci n'est pas une pipe." — René Magritte
Though he was talking about still images of all forms, M. Magritte was right. All images are a half truth at the very least, only representations, stand-ins. Photographs take fleeting moments and turn them into monuments of the past, my own, the subject's, or a collective. Some of those moments might have been lost to our imperfect memories if we had not made a memento. Photographs can tell us more than what we knew at the time. Or, by focusing so much on the representation, it can erase all detail and leave us with a new significance of that time.
I photograph for the moment, not the event. I believe it is important to document grand occasions in people's lives but I don't find joy in it. There are special places and times that require immortality without them being life altering events. This portfolio is filled with those moments.