I hope that these photographs stand on their own. However, as a writer, I have a lot of trouble keeping my "fingerative" mouth shut. Words, like images, are so tempting. My only excuse is that there is a precedent or, rather tradition, in that many exhibits are accompanied by an Artist's Statement. For lack of a better term, this is such a beast. I hope that the words will stand on their own, too. In any event, by separating pictures and words, I am trying to keep each from treading on the other and otherwise diluting their respective intentions and effects.
Why Versions of Truth?
In 1971, when I began photography, visual truth was sought, found and discussed almost exclusively in the perceived quality of a photographer's inner processes - whether creative, technical, or spiritual. Few worried about the actual physical existence of a photograph's subject.
Today the internal quest is the same, but it sometimes becomes obscured by doubt or cynicism. For example, many photographers, especially landscape artists, feel pressured to defend the physical truth of images they create and, in consequence, the integrity of their internal quest. Superficially, the power, freedom and intrusiveness of digital technology are made the culprits. What might have been real or true at the instant a photograph was taken becomes increasingly suspect as it is transformed from emulsion to digital format, through the digital darkroom, and output to one or more of a bewildering array of media.
If we suspect the physical reality of a photograph, it may mean we suspect reality itself and reality's multiple layers of truthfulness. Because of the high volume of "reality" with which we contend, we are forced up to its surface, to the easy and superficial. The truths dragging along behind are up for grabs. We get only glimpses of real truth and then they quickly fade away, behind us, out of our mind.
With these photographs, I am sorting through some of my versions of truth. I don't think they represent convergent truth or big truth; but they do represent an ordering: an evolving, truthful, latticework relationship among sometimes strange and often beautiful things.