Biography

It began with small things. A beetle crossing a stone. The skin of a tree. A lizard that held still just long enough. Children know how to stop for these things. Most of us forget, somewhere along the way, how much wonder is hidden in plain sight. I never wanted to forget. I still want to stop, to notice, to pay attention.

Drawing came first, then other ways of looking, and eventually, some twenty years ago, the camera stayed.

I still walk the same way: slowly, alone, with nowhere to be. My mind drifts to work, to family, to whatever it happens to be carrying that day, while my eyes keep searching on their own. Then something stops me. A mushroom no taller than a thumb. A pattern in the bark. So I kneel, or lie down in the moss, because that is where it can be seen.

Other times I go back to the same field, the same shoreline, again and again, waiting for a sky I have only imagined. The place is never the same twice. The wind has its own ideas.

I am drawn to what is quiet: empty space, soft edges, one thing given room to breathe. In infrared the sky turns black and the leaves turn to light, and the world becomes almost silent.

A picture isn't finished when the shutter closes. It grows slowly in the hours afterwards, sometimes through struggle, until it finally rests on paper, large enough to stand before and real enough to hold.

I rarely show it. That was never the point.

The point is the moment of noticing. Of stopping. Of giving something small a little more attention than the world usually allows.