Middle Distance

I photograph in and around cities. I walk and drive through them with multiple still cameras making pictures as I go. This movement back and forth, often covering the same terrain or region again and again, creates a rhythm of its own which becomes a platform for visual discovery. And the multiplicity of camera formats encourages me to engage different motifs - (urban) landscapes, portraits, found still lives, architectural exteriors and interiors - that reflect my layered experience...
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I photograph in and around cities. I walk and drive through them with multiple still cameras making pictures as I go. This movement back and forth, often covering the same terrain or region again and again, creates a rhythm of its own which becomes a platform for visual discovery. And the multiplicity of camera formats encourages me to engage different motifs - (urban) landscapes, portraits, found still lives, architectural exteriors and interiors - that reflect my layered experience of dense and/or expansive city environments.Not just any city will do. I am most attracted to port cities that are frayed around the edges, and where the movement of people and goods rarely stops; and cities where the cultural landscape refracts our anxieties around race, sex or class; and communities where deep cultural roots are threatened by gentrification and development. Often they are the same place. I have traced some of these themes in my project, Middle Distance or The Anxiety of Influence: Photographs from Los Angeles, to conjure the underlying tension I sense in much of the American urban landscape.