workspace project
The Workspace project is my ongoing attempt to examine the quasi-private spaces people carve out of their public work lives. Such spaces represent a tug of war between personal expression and comfort on the one hand and the unyielding demands of work on the other. The long-term accumulation of the tokens of that struggle, over years or even decades, can be formally beautiful in a very human and touching way. The project is part of a larger series in which I ask friends and strangers to open up private spaces to my camera.
Because I document a space exactly as I find it, never arranged for the camera, the Workspace project is necessarily a spontaneous process. I can't, for example, call ahead and explain what I'm after without inviting the destruction of what I hope to capture. Lately I've been finding workspaces by walking in off the street with camera and tripod and simply asking (though "simply asking" doesn't quite convey the complex dance of explanation, skepticism, persuasion, and fascination that goes back and forth). What I end up capturing, then, turns out to be the work that was interrupted to answer the door.
(January 2007)
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(images from the Workspace series are available as editioned, large-format prints: sales information)
amnh
Street photography is my passion -- a wild mix of technical skill and social engineering, with every component changing and evolving second by second. The original amnh series was shot over a period of six weeks in New York's American Museum of Natural History, and spins my love of street photography into a radically different environment, a sort of off-the-street photography. The project carried me from sunlight into museum darkness, from rapid-fire to a zen-like slow motion, and forced me to rethink the whole process of stalking strangers. These images strip the components of traditional street photo down to the barest cues: silhouettes gazing out over vast, artificial veldts and jungles.
(fall 2005; a second series was begun fall 2008)
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(images from the amnh series are available as editioned, large-format prints: sales information)
lcd
To create the images for my series "LCD," I photographed visitors at the American Museum of Natural History, basing all choices about focus, white balance, color, contrast, etc. solely on the LCD screen that was captured; the rest of the image was allowed to fall where it may. Other than those adjustments, the images are unaltered.
(winter 2008-2009)
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(images from the lcd series are available as editioned prints: sales information)
cbgb
In September 2006, I spent a week photographing the interior of CBGB, the legendary NYC punk and rock club.
The experience was nothing like what I expected when I contacted owner Hilly Kristal for permission to shoot. Each day I'd arrive before noon and assemble my camera and tripod, and then spend five to six hours photographing the club, completely alone in the near dark and dead silence. Because the floor was soft, even rotten in places, and some of my exposures were as long as two minutes, I spent much of the time sitting motionless in the waiting for the shutter to close. My only other visits to the club had been for deafening, raucous, crowded shows, so I was surprised to find that I entered the club each morning looking forward to quiet and solitude.
After five visits I took a break, intending to go back for some final images. But six weeks later the club closed its doors forever and the interior was dismantled. Almost a year after that, in August 2007, Hilly Kristal succumbed to lung cancer and died, the space still empty and unrented.
(September 2006)
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(images from the CBGB series are available as editioned, large-format prints: sales information)