Leafsmoke

Through a round of seasons, photographing intimate details of my environment from backyards to interiors, deep woods to prairies...my approach is to evoke magic, enchantment, and atmosphere in scenes of my daily life. The images are of rites, rituals, and covenants...they are what lins us together; they are our earthly ties.

There is a powerful reality to ordinary rhythms and myths; there is also a poetic structure to our external and internal identity...what we saw, knew, touched, and dreamed in our everyday world. Wendell Berry once said"We are fast coming to the end of what we were given". With these words in mind, it is my goal to travel deeper into an environment called HOME...and our sense of placeness. The photographs appear dreamlike, infused between time and culture, sometimes naive without definition. There are glimpses of childhood, and places with unseen people, mixed with ephermeral views of magic light on animals. It is these endangered gifts that are the primary source of inspiration for my photography. My purpose is to tell a story of kinship: how an environment provides the background for its inhabitants...and, compare the knowing of the scent of leafsmoke to something we all recognize and recall with fleetingness, like childhood perhaps.

These images are primarily made with a view camera and vintage lenses. Some are 8x10 contact sunprints on printing out paper and gold-toned, others are toned silver-gelatin, and finally others are toned silver-gelatin painted pictures.