Situations

Situations is my most recent and ongoing body of work. The images begin with ordinary photographic fragments but are constructed into scenes that resist logical explanation. Something in them is recognizable, yet something else is unmistakably wrong.

Lee Friedlander and William Eggleston were important early influences, particularly in their ability to find visual tension in the everyday. My own approach, however, has increasingly moved away from the single observed moment and toward the constructed situation.

I draw on a vast archive of photographs accumulated over many years. Ideas often emerge unexpectedly from the juxtaposition of images that were never made with one another in mind. A gesture, an object, a landscape, or an architectural detail can become the starting point for a new situation.

Irony and humor are central to the work, but so is uncertainty. I am interested in the moment when an image shifts from familiar to inexplicable—when the viewer recognizes the world being depicted but can no longer quite trust the logic governing it.

The resulting photographs occupy a space between observation and invention. They look as though they might have happened, even when they could not have happened in quite the way they appear.