I’m 80 years old. These images were all made this year and I think that they suggest that the best is yet to come, a culmination of decades of mastering both technique and vision.
I always seem to be on the outside looking in, making quiet observations of the things I see, leaving the viewer to pick up on details that are often overlooked. They say the devil is in the details and the layers in every inch of these recent images are loaded with unexplained information that invite questions, perhaps prompting a nebulous memory, and challenging the imagination.
(220402_010, West Hollywood, CA 2022)
I like the cool detachment of this image. There are two figures that are disconnected, framed by layers of landscape and objects, both elegant and ordinary. People have said that the flatness of the color in the woman’s face is reminiscent of the paintings of Alex Katz. I take that as a compliment because I like his work.
The photographer Ansel Adams talks about pre-visualizing (seeing) the final resulting
photograph before taking it. I have a general idea of what I want, but there are too many moving pieces to know exactly where things will go. When I see the raw files in post-production, I have a better idea of how the final result will turn out.
(220708_002-v2, West Hollywood, CA 2022)
This is actually one photo, intentionally cropped to compose the final image which looks like collage of details. As one who has lived in West Hollywood for a long time, this is my in-
camera mash up of a typical street scene.
(220708_002-v2, raw image)
The original image is broken into several parts that don’t easily connect to one another. There are a number of extraneous elements that distract from the story that I’m trying to tell. Cropping out the unnecessary elements, and visually bringing out others, ties everything together.
(220409_004, West Hollywood, CA 2022)
In the previous images, details are stacked in layers like a deck of playing cards. Here, you can see the details laid out side by side. The reflections in the windows give us three separate views of the street, with my reflection and the woman seated inside the window in the middle scene. We are reminded that the photographer is always present in an image whether seen or not.