Photographs are stubborn things. The slow emulsions of early photographic processes turn Paris and London into ghost towns, void of people and all transient activity: nothing to do with what either city ever looked like. Eddie Adams’ 1968 photograph of General Loan executing a man in Vietnam freezes the action after the bullet enters and before it exits the victim’s head. The bullet entered Nguyen Van Lem’s head over forty years ago and in Adam’s photograph, it still rests there: nothing to do with what the execution looked like. In my family’s vacation photos, we are all lined up shoulder-to-shoulder in front of some point of interest (or the station wagon): nothing to do with what the vacation was, merely how the vacation was photographed.
Most photographs successfully avoid the truth and fascinate me because their lies are so plausible. I am trying to discover more than control and consider photography itself my principle subject matter. With different subjects and diverse techniques, my photographs are constructed from expanded or compressed traces of time. These images, made with some combination of time-lapse, slow exposure, successive doses of light, or prolonged development, largely replace photography’s struggle to document with photography’s power to invent. Published in 2002, Lyle Rexer's book Photography's Antiquarian Avant-garde situates my work with other contemporary and historical photographers working in both mystical and material ways, "letting the chemistry of the emulsion register chance and time, turning Talbot's ‘pencil of nature’ into a paintbrush."
