Lines of Sight, 1994-96

Lines of Sight began as a study of lines created by the intersection of walls and the flat plains created by the light giving tone to difference surfaces. Going further I found I wanted to include more of a space. So I emptied my apartment rooms of anything recognizable concentrating on the subject of light.

This project was a good test for me slow down and study something basic to the photographic medium. It also made me look closely at the camera's framing of information. The placement of lines, shapes and tones became important to create a composition. As my work had always been mistaken for paintings I began to study the works of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. What became interesting to me is that my images needed to remain as photographs. Once the viewer became aware of the medium their understandable question was "what is it a photography of." This is important as we assume the photograph is a representation of the real world or object. It is a desire to recognize the subject within a photograph. Ultimately I didn't care if one read the image as an empty room. I wanted the subject to be the record of light.

Concealing information in the photographic image has left me with minimized shapes and lines that subtly divide, recede and smooth the plane of the while jeopardizing loss entirely. My pictures are muddy and occasionally unreadable, resulting from an interest in the way objects appeared within my peripheral vision. As I move through a space this oblique vision directs my reading as much as what is immediately before me. The environment is made seductive by those objects that can not be easily seen. As such, they stand for the secret and inaccessible. I grasp for a tentative understanding. It's the enchantment with things that by nature are obscure, that follows from both my terror of and desire for this very obscurity. A normal cone of vision consists of a viewing area referred to as lines of sight. It has been my intention to quiet the chaos of unwanted information by narrowing this degree of vision. While I fear losing that which is tangible, I am seduced by the displacement of reality. Or at the least, I am seduced by entering a reality that is simplified in its viewpoint.