I do not consider myself a documentary photographer because I do not believe photography has a documentary imperative. From a spiritual perspective, to grasp at life in order to create some sort of permanence is a misperception of reality, so to believe the camera preserves a moment in time is to believe photography perpetuates a delusion. Life is a process of perpetual becoming, of infinite creation. Life is art, and the meaning of art is the process itself: from inspiration, through creation to perception by another. This is the meaningful narrative arc repeated endlessly through the illusion of time. Photography can only tell the truth if it affirms this.
So if I am not documenting the world with my camera, what am I doing? Perhaps an explanation of how I became a photographer will help make it clear.
In the early 1990s I attended an exhibition of Ray Metzker’s landscapes at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The work literally took my breath away. The illusion of time disappeared in the viewing of his images and I felt completely alive.
Being artistically and spiritually naïve, I thought the proper response was to incorporate what I had seen into my sense of who I was. So I went into the woods with a camera to re-create a “Metzker Landscape,” working first with a 35 mm pentax, then a toyo 4 x 5, and eventually a deardorff 8 x10. Such folly was a form of grasping and could only end in failure.
Re-creating Metzker’s work was, of course, impossible, but I kept shooting and processing and printing because these activities themselves engaged me. Over the years, my work improved so that I eventually began to take pleasure from looking at my images. What I experienced when I saw them was not to remember Metzker’s remarkable photographs, even less to remember the subject of the particular picture I had taken. My delight (if that is the right word) came from the resuscitation of the feeling of making the photograph. Not that seeing the images made me remember standing in the river or field with all of my senses engaged, experiencing the light, handling the equipment and calculating the aperture and speed. What I experienced on viewing the images was the recreation of the feeling of being fully in the present moment—in short, of being completely alive.
This is what I seek in any work of art I view: the experience of being fully in the present moment. It is all that I hope to provoke in others through my own work.
One of my chosen media for this is the darkroom. Whether the subject of a photograph arises by means of the camera from the world around me, or without the camera from the infinite potential of the film emulsion itself doesn’t matter. What does matter is being completely alive.