ends the outside world looks a bit different, almost as if that filmic world has followed you down the street. We are changed by our encounters with culture. A reading or a talk or a conversation, an idea or an image will stay with you, just as other things that you experience might change your perspective. Afterwards, you may see these new ideas and images and perspectives reflected in things around you. Like seeing the face of someone familiar in a crowd of strangers—whether they were actually there or not—you are now suddenly prepared to see them. Once let in, once made aware, these new ideas give you the knowledge and the tools to recognize and appreciate what you might see. New ways of seeing are not a result of what we see, for the physical characteristics of our eyes stays the same. New ways of seeing are the result of what we think and how we think. This book is about how the history of photography has changed me.
It would be a conceit to say that my work ran the full gamut of photographic history, and I’m not trying to trace its breadth or its depth here, I’m only taking note of its mark upon images I have already made. You may think this strange, but I feel I can attempt this project because I realize my conceptions (visual or otherwise) are somewhat unoriginal. And I don’t mean that in a self-deprecating way. It’s simply noticing the truth that things we make or create are rarely singularly unique conceptually. Our ideas reflect and rarely extend very far beyond other trains of thought that pre-exist us. Perhaps unbeknownst to us, we’re engaged in a deep conversation about our world as we try to understand the form it takes. Each of our lives reflects this conversation. My pictures are images of that dialog. If we recognize the
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