Collecting…

"Perhaps this is why working in series is so important to photography, for to shape a personal vision requires revisiting a subject over many images to create a more focused and particular view, rather than relying on the unique aspects of a single image. In other words, photography is particularly suited to the accumulation of and relationships between many images, rather than to the specific imprint on the individual image, to create a unique vision or outlook"

-Sze Tsung Leong from A Picture You Already Know (2007)

In the words of Minor White, the photographer invents nothing. We venture forth in a blank and receptive state of mind in search of images that fill our mental canvas with visual poetry. Our only job as photographers is the transmission of these images in a meaningful and cohesive way to the viewer. This process of transmission is the art of photography. Learning not just to see photographically, but to tell photographically. We accumulate and gather small chapters of our story every day, individual lines of poetry, sections of tile in the larger mosaic. The concept of Collecting is so vital to my current focus with regard to photographic art. It represents a rejection of the idea of making artistic images in the tradition of the pictorialists (today’s Photoshop Art), as well as the harshness of taking pictures (soul stealing & paparazzi). I invent nothing through the individual image. I cannot photograph a tree and call it art. The tree itself is the work of art. If I hold a mirror up to a tree, the image in the mirror is not art. However, I can photograph that same tree every day for a year and create a body of work that tells a story about that tree. My accumulated images of the tree, and the resulting story that they tell becomes an artistic body of work.