Dia de Muertos: A visual journey through Oaxcas’ sacred conversation with death.

Dia de Muertos: A visual journey through Oaxcas’ sacred conversation with death.

There are people that create images and those that collect images. I collect mine.

Since boyhood, I’ve found myself drawn to a seemingly simple action – a mostly unconscious editing and arranging of the things that pass through my eyes.

Innately, I struggled for a path – a process that might contain my compositional thought – a method to record the way I thought something should look when I organized it in my mind.

As a boy, drawing filled that need. After years of intentional and aimless sketching, I developed a fascination with super-realism and a love/hate relationship with exactness.

I developed enough skill to begin drawings, but I lacked the patience necessary to complete them.

I needed something quicker but with bookends.

In my pre-teen years, a camera and a scoutmaster proved to me that pencil and paper could not keep up with my poly-thinking mind.

What began was my life-long exploration of equipment, technique and creativity that has since accompanied me on all my adventures.

Ultimately, I’m an experientialist. I thrive on interest, investigation (often distraction) and an invitation to immersion.

As an experientialist, I struggle to deny any of these pursuits.

On account of this, not in spite of it, I’m able to present work that speaks for me with several different voices.

One voice might tell a story of a tangent culture that embraces its own traditions as much as we embrace ours.

One may describe a landscape that can never be repeated and leaves the viewer to craft their own adventure.

Another voice takes a closer look at what we tend to pass over, only to hand it over to the viewer to add their own interplay – as collaborator.

No matter what I choose, it’s what I’ve seen.

Another collected experience.

“For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson