Artist Statement

My education in photography was through multiple approaches and teachers. One,

photography as conceptual art form, and the other, from a modernist approach. As it

is, and for the most part, my photography has something of both. While I have a

deep appreciation for a beautiful formal photograph, I must ask the question I teach

my students to ask; What is the photograph about? I am deeply curious about the

other story, however fleeting a moment it reveals, and how it relates to

photography’s visual soundness, as photography’s relationship to truth is constantly

changing. I am interested in what happens visually, psychologically, and emotionally

when one photograph is next to another. When I alter a photograph, I am asking

the question about how to re-represent, re-think, re-contextualize the original image.

I use the female figure to represent a female way bigger than me. Over many

years, the alterations I make in my photos are in varying stages of the process:

during exposures at night with camera movement or subject blur, after the print is

made with added selective color, using appropriated text & image, collage and

digitally montaged images in a composition. What begins as an intuitive process of

scenes or of figure are unsurprisingly, parts of my life.