CONCEPTUAL-BASED PHOTOGRAPHS 2003–2016 (Scroll to view all projects)

War

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, I was distraught with the knowledge that it was based on lies, and that most Americans believed those lies. One day, while looking at a news magazine, I picked up a video camera and through tears of grief ritualistically moved the macro lens against the glossy images of war and famine to “heal.” When I later viewed the video I could see frames of beauty that had been born from disaster. This was the beginning of these conceptual-based photographs that aim to penetrate the violence and voyeurism of news media. These photos are not collaged or computer-manipulated, but reveal a painterly aesthetic that re-frames the violence behind them.

Global Portraits

The abstraction of these ambiguously familiar images reflects the disconnected lens through which we (mostly) experience global events. Technology serves as both medium and message, and the images’ graininess and loss of focus are intended to raise questions rather than answer them. I show the artifice of the 4-color printing process by revealing the mechanical dots, glare from the light, blurriness, distortion, and (sometimes) random text bleeding in from the other side of the printed page.

Machine

Media has long acted as a bridge, a means to engage beyond the immediacies of one’s own life. But in the age of the internet and social media, this constant flow of information — infinite yet curated, unbiased yet censored — often becomes overwhelming and deafening.

And in an American culture that situates people as voyeurs, the visual drama that unfolds through the veil of the digital medium often enables us in “developed” countries to live a relatively safe but vicariously dramatic life at a distance.

Weather

My aesthetic interest is in accentuating the distortion of a reality that is brought to us through the sideways lens of the doom scroll.