When you make art it can be a challenge to find the right language to explain what you’re doing. One might say that an artist needn’t ever explain him or herself. But art is a good conversation topic precisely because no two viewers or listeners share the same perspective. And since a viewer doesn’t share the artist’s own perspective, since a viewer isn’t intimately familiar with the history of choices the artist made in pursuing a certain visual result, the artist must offer the viewer a stepladder for reaching a vantage point that allows a work’s potential to be seen. That “stepladder” might be a word or phrase, a bit of language that gives the viewer a suggestion of where to look, how to begin understanding the piece at hand.

I’ve been describing my effort in photography as “photo pairing.” That’s been my language so far. I’m looking to create pairings or marriages between images that give rise to a kind of contrapuntal dialogue, where each image gains from being situated next to the other, where the viewer’s eye is guided seamlessly back and forth between the two images in such a way that no one image steals all the attention.

Some new language occurred to me the other day, as I was trying to make a video. Each photograph in a pairing can be thought of as an individual “word.” Together the two photographs combine, like words, into a “visual sentence.” The sentence draws out a deeper, and more specific meaning than each component word or image would convey on its own.

So instead of saying I’m working to create interesting photographic pairings, I’m going to try out some new language. I’ll say that I’m working to compose “visual sentences.” Sentences that mean more than the words they consist of. Sentences that teach us something. Here’s a video where I’m using this new terminology:

As a photographer, I strive to create pairings or marriages among disparate images. The goal of photographic pairing is the same as the goal of musical counterpoint. In counterpoint, we take two independent melodies and play them at the same time, hoping to discover something new in their dialogue, hoping the melodies may express something in conversation with each other that they could not or would not express on their own. When we take two photographs of different subjects, captured at different times and places, and position them side by side, if we’re lucky, we may achieve the same result — a conversation might arise, a dialogue between the two images where each individual seems to be enhancing the other, helping the other realize its full potential.

The idea of pairing photographs occurred to me sometime during the Covid lockdown of 2020 when I was contemplating my next steps as a photographer. I have been pursuing the same “thing” as a photographer since I first displayed my work publicly in 2011. In some sense, my style hasn’t changed or evolved in all that time. In a decade plus, I have been seeking better and better examples of the ideal that has captivated me since I first began.

I take closeups of everyday subjects — a chain link fence, a shriveled leaf — using them as raw material for graphic abstractions. I’m interested in these subjects both for what they are, and for what they offer visually, for what lines, textures, and colors they provide. I want the image to look like the thing itself, not like a photograph of the thing. When I print the image, I want to feel amazed, almost afraid to pick up the print, because it looks so real, so palpable, because its texture is so boldly accosting, because it seems to be alive and in motion even though it portrays a still subject. I want the image to delight in its squareness, meaning that it should be a dynamic square, with a sense of motion or activity throughout, addressing all four corners of the frame, in such a way that the composition breaks the symmetry of the stable, solid, unbudging square while still appearing balanced, harmonious, proportionate inside those walls.

Every once in a while I’m successful in achieving these goals that I’ve just begun to describe above. Every once in a while I’m left with something perfect. A photograph can be perfect, this medium lends itself to perfection, I don’t mean to toot my own horn. The flaw of a perfect photograph is that it is too perfect. Sometimes I want more variety, more diversity from a perfect image. My biggest revelation in my past couple of years of photographic works is that when I’m unsatisfied by a “perfect” image, I can sometimes find what I seek by pairing that image with another. Through coupling, through marriage, a photograph can extend beyond itself, becoming something bigger and greater than it can be on its own. My personal library lends itself to this kind of coupling because, again, my style has remained the same over ten years. An image from 2011 can find a partner in an image from 2022, with them both appearing to have been shot on the same day.

Since I began pairing my images in 2020 I’ve accumulated a few dozen examples that excite me and that I would like to share with you in time. To begin, I’ve made these two videos about what I’m pursuing: