"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour."
- William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence"
"The division of the perceived universe into parts and wholes is convenient and may be necessary, but no necessity determines how it shall be done."
- Gregory Bateson (anthropologist, 1904 - 1980)
"Nature has neither core
Nor outer rind,
It's yourself you should scrutinize to see
Whether you're center or periphery."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 


My imaging philosophy is very simple. I strive to record the subtle, interconnected web of energy that makes up what we call the world. 

For me, beauty, which permeates everything around us, appears in its most sublime state when form, color, pattern and texture are all in harmony.

In the same way as all "objects" in this world are fundamentally impermanent, and essentially arbitrary, partitions of an otherwise continuous, unfragmented whole, photography is (again, for me) an almost mystical process whereby the "veils of fragmentation" are momentarily lifted and the underlying essence of the universe is revealed. To "see" the whole, one must first learn see "parts" as real illusions.

Photographs are nothing other than abstract brushstrokes applied to nature. If one applies these brushsrokes intuitively, so that they capture a part of nature's deep rhythms, they permit our minds to glimpse, however briefly, the even deeper truth that lies forever hidden beyond our physical senses. 

The better an image is at weaving together, in holographic fashion, the seemingly disparate "things" that make up the world, and thereby at creating a unified, emergent whole that transcends any single element of which it is composed, the happier I am as a photographer. The ultimate photographic expression, of course, would be to capture everything in nothing, but the resulting image might appear to some as too uninteresting to display ;-)


 

Updated April 2005