Organic Studies
Scanner as Camera
Organic Studies stemmed from my grandmother’s illness and death, and my resulting fascination with immortalizing death and decay. I do this by taking little pieces of the natural world out of context so that I can study them in more detail and without distraction. The resulting images have an inherent sensuality that is impossible to ignore, and is found throughout nature. This is far more than the obvious male sexuality that is so often apparent in flowers. In fact, many of the images are essentially female. They have a sense of envelopment, of soft sensuality, of fertility. Even though this project started as a testament to the beauty in death, when I see these images, I know they are also about fertility, relationship and rebirth.
Scanner as Camera/Scanner Art
Organic Studies consists of two-dimensional digital flatbed scans of three-dimensional organic objects printed onto watercolor paper. The resulting image has a soft, painterly quality that is quite different from the traditional photographic image and is much more fitting to the subject’s ethereal qualities.
I enjoy the contradiction of photographing soft organic objects using state of the art digital technology and breaking the rules of traditional photography by making photographs without a camera. The subsequent images created on the computer cannot be achieved in any other way.