The following is an attempt at putting my evolving photographic philosophy into a coherent body of sentences. I tend to get frustrated with every artist statement I write a few months after making it, but this one is an amalgamation of multiple attempts at trying to put my disparate ideas on image making into one statement, so I think it’ll be good enough to last a few years. We’ll see how long it lasts. 🙂
I want to create photographs about what it means to be alive. To make the viewer feel emotionally involved in the stories of regular people. To spread the idea that a normal life is worth remembering. So often we live life and lament to record it. Photography is my way of recording life to remind myself and others to live it.
My work is almost always candid. I feel most kinship with the genre commonly referred to as “street photography” but oftentimes my images show my friends and family. A better way to describe my artistic philosophy is a belief in the common or everyday being sacred. To work in the same vein as the artists Pieter Brueghel, Andrew Wyeth, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Through increasing the value of everyday situations in my mind I hope to momentarily overcome nihilism and pessimism. Stating the world as being beautiful is my way of rebelling against the injustice of the universe. There’s important work to be done when it comes to learning how to see and appreciate a normal life. It’s easy to identify with the darker emotions inside me and the pessimistic viewpoints advertised through my screens. It takes courage to search for what lives and glows despite modernity’s darkness.
I love the simple act of putting four corners around the world. It allows me to express the feelings that go beyond words. To reproduce what I saw onto the photographic paper gives me the ability to reflect who I was and how this made me who I am. My photographs strive to illustrate how to make something out of the human experience, rather than just be an observer of it. To affirm love for my world, my place in it, and that which is still here, if only for a short period of time.
