Associations
Several decades ago, when I was a young man, I discovered something about images. One evening a friend was modeling for me. She was a few years older and was someone I was infatuated with. She was mercurial, easily bored, wouldn't sit still long enough for me to work on any sustained drawings but didn't object to me photographing her. Which I had tried, in that casual snapshot sort of way, and nothing more because I didn't like photographs and never had taken any that really interested me.
I wasn't prepared for a photoshoot, all I had for film were two rolls of infrared color slide film. But, she was naked and agreed to let me take some pictures, so I grabbed the camera and film that I had. Just two rolls, so I decided to expose the film multiple times. I only had two rolls and I wanted to keep her naked and in my view longer.
It was a couple months before I even had the film developed. And the images I got back shocked me. The images were a confused jumble of interlocking fragments, incomplete, confused, often anonymous and perverse, subjective and illogical, with mismatched perspectives, awkward framings, irregular personal viewpoints. And, there was actually something there, something that worked as a description of my erotic perceptions and obsessions, something that was beyond the mechanical, something personal and a vocabulary that I could explore and develop.
In the years since then I've explored this way of making images. I found that if I could focus on the erotic aspects of... people, or landscapes, or buildings, or art, or whatever I was interested in. If I could locate the erotic charge and get it onto film, then, by combining it at random with later image sets I would get these strips of film collages to puzzle over and work with.
Constructions, collisions of the present with the past, culture with nature, desire with the restrictions of convention - these chance combinations that come from running film through cameras multiple times. I keep brief notes regarding themes on each roll and beyond that rely on random occurrences and luck for the image combinations. Producing images this way has become a natural and usual process for me, the combinations an analogy for how I construct my erotic self and experience the world.
Themes
Fertility
Presentation
Voyeurism and Exhibitionism
Embedment
Our Perverse Religion
Intimacy and Alienation
Mythologies
Drowning
