Artist Statement

I grew up in Ohio. Flat, green, humid summers, grey winters. Nice enough, but not the kind of landscape that stops you in your tracks. When I first drove through Utah and Arizona, something clicked. I didn't have the vocabulary for it then, but I knew I wanted to keep coming back.

That was over twenty-five years ago. What started as a hobby got more serious over time. I spent most of my career in technology, which might seem unrelated, but it actually shaped how I work. I learned to be methodical, to sit with problems, to notice small things. Those habits translated pretty directly to photography — I'm willing to return to locations over and over, waiting for the right combination of light and weather. It takes a while. That's fine.

There's a technical side to what I do, which you can read about on the About page. But the reason I keep at it isn't technical. Standing alone in a canyon at sunrise, or on a mesa when a storm is rolling in — there's a stillness to those moments that's hard to find anywhere else. The camera almost becomes secondary. You're just there, paying attention.

I think that's what I'm trying to put into the photographs. Not just what these places look like, but what it feels like to be in them. The quiet. The sense that the rock and sky have been doing this for millions of years and will keep doing it long after you leave.

One image that comes to mind: the Mitten Shadow Event at Monument Valley. I'd been to the valley probably eight or nine times over several years, mostly shooting the obvious compositions — the mittens at sunrise, the drive through the buttes. Good images, but nothing that surprised me. On this particular trip I arrived before dawn and set up at a spot I'd marked on a previous visit, a slight elevation north of the road. The light came up fast and the shadow from the West Mitten stretched across the desert floor into a long diagonal. I had maybe four minutes before it shifted. Shot two sheets of film. One of them is what ended up in the collection.

I've returned to that same spot twice since and never gotten the same shadow. Cloud cover, different time of year, slightly different angle of light — the conditions just haven't lined up again. That's not unusual. A lot of the images in this collection came together in windows like that, sometimes after multiple failed trips to the same location.

If someone looks at one of my prints and feels some of that — or decides they want to visit the Southwest themselves — that's the best outcome I could hope for.