“There is a plain unbroken prairie of open sea, lined and rippled with myriad smiling trails of minute undulations, dark and sombrous and profoundly calm, over the dead below — smooth as a tombstone.”
— From Journal of the Photographic Society, February 21, 1857
The ocean portraits are as much about the process of making them, as they are about the result. Standing on the bluffs or at the edge of the shore with a dark cloth over my head, that is attached to the camera, I basically let the picture take itself. Galvanized by memory and drawings of the sea it is precisely this played-out subject matter — this already existing theater — that captivates me. It is the familiarity which intrigues me. Drained it remains a surface, a skin, a blank screen on which I can project an array of emotions.
With hand applied emulsion I bring these photographs closer to the realm of drawing. The subject, the ocean, becomes an interior or inner image, suggestive of the fluids of the body or other abstract movement. I am often drawn to adverse weather conditions that eradicate most of the typical seascape information, leaving either faint echoes of memory or turbulent disturbances of emotion.
These photographs exist in two formats. They are platinum/palladium contact prints as well as mural size gelatin silver prints.