“Landscape photography is ripe for reinvention.” Mark Klett

The photographs in Transfigurations are a lust for the primitive. They seek to understand beauty and terror, which are inseparable. I wish to photograph the impossible, to fix the fugitive on film. In the desert nothing remains static; even the rocks move.

The intent of these photographs eludes a direct approach. Their content is not related to a specificity of place, but rather hovers in the experience of phenomena. In the field I have no preconception of what I will photograph. I rely upon instinct, often waiting a long time before any impulse arises. Later, in the darkroom, where the other half goes to work, I am taken aback by what appears. They are gifts for which I am now responsible; the burden of resonance lies as much with the print as it does with the camera.

Traversing a polarized history, landscape photography shifted from scientific exploration to the idealization of nature and the spectacle of human ‘progress’. Lost along the way was a sense that photographs of the land can speak to an ecstatic experience.

Borne of this lineage, Transfigurations embraces veracity and transformation, photography’s duality. These images are an atavistic contemplation of the origin, drawing out the mythological potential of the desert. The landscape is only discernible because of the presence of what is fundamentally absent. Myth and metaphor remain unfixed, open.