Haiku: Photographic Meditations

Artist statement

From decades of work, I came to understand that because our emotional responses are based in time, if I want to express the emotion I felt (as opposed to the emotion felt by the subject, or a generalized abstract emotion) at the time the photograph was made, that I must also encode the element of time within the image. Using the camera’s unique ability to “average time” through long exposures ranging from 20 seconds to 60 minutes, I am able to reveal what is felt but generally unseen. This process eliminates what I have termed “visual noise.”          For example, “Storrow Drive” was a ten-minute exposure in Boston during which 579 cars, 19 joggers, 7 pedestrians, 5 rollerbladers, 4 bicyclists, a pair of twins in a stroller and 1 dog passed in front of the camera, but those fleeting visitors to the scene only distract us from the essence of the place. With my camera, I am able to encode the element of time within the image and thereby translate this hidden world into a visible form for us to contemplate.