A Precarious Undertaking

It is Difficult to Get the News from Poems
A life Without Pain (for Morrie Camhi)
Time Prevents Everything From Happening at Once
The Ghost in the Machine
We Boil at Different Degrees

As a child & young man in New York, I would often visit the abstract expressionist paintings at MOMA.  A great piece would have color, complexity of detail & an emotional intensity all rolled into one composition. The intensity & relationship of the parts would keep my eyes moving around the canvas until they merged together into a single experience. It just knocked me out.

I never forgot those canvases & eventually developed this project using a camera but with, hopefully, a painters sensibility.

Photography is perceived as conceptually different from painting. Unique to this medium, it is considered primarily a carrier of information. As soon as we grasp that information (usually quickly, even in a strong image) we move on. I am trying to add layers of complexity of detail & color that will produce something akin to a painting & demand that the viewer spend some time with the image.

Each of these images may be viewed individually. However they are also meant to be shown in grids of nine, each of the grids having its own internal narrative & title. On the following pages, the thumbnails are arranged in grids as the images are intended to be shown on the wall. In the gallery, I hope viewers will spend time with the individual images & then, stepping back, perceive them as a group with its own emotional & visual dynamic.

All images are shot on film without digital manipulation.