Artist Statement
I took my first photographs as a young child growing up in Coronado, a seaside town in southern California near San Diego, with a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye my father gave me. His enthusiasm for photography inspired me. Other cameras followed, and I often carried one with me, particularly whenever I traveled and, sometimes, during graduate studies in history at UCLA, in Israel, and at the University of Cambridge. I am particularly interested in macro photography, which captures overlooked details and explores miniature worlds hidden in ordinary objects, and in the relationship of color, light, shadow, form, perception, and imagination.
I have always enjoyed photographing water, especially the Pacific Ocean; horses and their riders; architecture and its abstract forms; and the expansive horizons of the American West. During Maryland’s recent snowy winters, I have focused increasingly on close-up photography and on experimenting with ways to capture the forms, colors, changing nature, and abstract qualities of ice and other forms of water.These abstract photographs capture ice and other forms of water and variations of light, all interacting with glass. The result of different lighting conditions, the images evolve, with adjustments, into abstract representations of four elements of the physical world: earth, air, fire, and water.
These abstract ice and water images are divided into categories of form, but this organization is offered only as a suggested framework and not as a limiting structure. The images are titled, but they are open to interpretation by viewers, guided by their own intuition, perceptions, experiences, and memories. These abstract photographs invite an interaction between the image and the imagination of the viewer. The photographer sees one thing in these abstract images. Perhaps you see something else.
The forms in these abstract photographs are unrepeatable. Each image provides a glimpse of water at the macro level, its forms, natural patterns, and chance combinations that constantly change during the process of capturing the image. The final result is a sometimes representational, sometimes surreal image of something in the larger world, beyond the viewfinder: a landscape, a seascape, a life form, a space form—remembered, dreamed, or imagined.