With digital photography everywhere, our eyes have grown accustomed to seeing technically perfect, flawless, sterile images. The photochemical process, on the other hand, is organic, alive, fragile, subject to decay, and often producing images that have flaws. The tension between these two processes has spurred my interest in contemporary work that illuminates analog photography's production properties while also questioning, conceptually and physically, what a photograph is.

In order to explore the physicality of light-sensitive surfaces and make their organic and unstable nature visible, I’ve created abstract images from layers of photochemical materials and processes—both literal layers (of roll film negatives), and step-by-step layers of camerawork, film, and processing.

These prints are essentially photographs of a negative of negatives layered on top of a light box. First I used roll film to make images of clear blue sky, exposed to ensure even but varied density. Then I layered the negatives on a light box, where I photographed them with a 4 x 5 camera using Fuji instant black and white film. After I peeled apart the instant film, which has a grainy, semi stable negative, I discarded the positives and allowed some of the negatives to solarize; then I left them in a drawer, exposing them to age and casual damage, allowing their inherent instability to become visible. Finally, I rephotographed the Fuji negatives with photo-offset lith film, increasing the contrast, in order to make the prints you see now.

During the last ten to fifteen years there have been dramatic changes in the medium of photography. Sometimes I feel like it's not the same medium that I embraced as an art form over 20 years ago. One striking difference is the accessibility of taking pictures and the meteoric rise of people with cameras and the images flowing from those cameras. In an attempt to study these changes I started photographing people photographing at a very popular spot for this activity near where I live.

I started this project with a certain amount of contempt. I made the pictures by blending in with them. I pretended to be one of them. I followed them around. They were my prey. What I found particularly interesting in the resulting images, however, was the variety of postures and gestures related to the challenge of translating a visceral experience into a photograph. The range of physicality in this common activity led me to see these people as individuals. They want to look at the world around them with a camera and bring home a picture. In that sense they are photographers just like me.