ARTIST STATEMENT
I use photography to examine the relationship between the documentary and the subjective. First, I am drawn to something visually, then I generate photographs from the emotional response that I feel at the time. I do not manipulate my subject matter because, for me, photography is a practice of noticing, seeing, and yielding to what there is. I am constantly thinking about my perception of a place, awareness of my surroundings, and how my photographs evolve as my relationship with my subject matter deepens.
I am especially interested in exploring how form is created by utility, ingenuity is born from adaptation, and the poignancy of everyday life in rural Alaska. The series "Quinhagak, Bethel, Nikolai" explores how physical remoteness shapes the material culture and physical landscape of communities in far Western Alaska. The work stems from relationships that I have built from living and working in the area and returning to visiting friends at their homes and subsistence hunting and fishing camps.
I made my film negatives into copperplate photogravures because the richness and extreme detail of photogravure best captures the beauty, complexity and feeling that I find in the subarctic. The transformation of each image as it is etched into a copper, inked by hand, and made into an intaglio print allows for ambiguity and blurs the boundaries of time past and present.