These portraits of me were taken in the Summer of 2022 by the wonderful Agnieszka Rytych-Foster.
This first one is about geometric abstraction:
About the second one: it’s easy to center a sunflower inside a square so it looks good, but here I wanted to create an asymmetric composition where the swirling core is in-and-out of focus, bleeding across the left edge of the image, while giving way to a radiance of petals on the right. Why does this image pair with the crumbled temple stone from South India? I could try to explain it, but I’ll save my words and let you look:
In the third portrait, I’m holding a fall leaf and a spring leaf side-by-side. I captured these images a few years apart, not thinking about the first leaf when I later encountered the second. Looking through my portfolio one day, I noticed that the central veins of these two leaves align with each other, allowing the two photographs to almost snap together like lego pieces, creating one extended leaf. My smile in this photograph is a reenactment of how I felt when I noticed this happy coincidence. And I’ve dedicated countless hours to searching for more coincidences like this – not taking photographs with the intention to pair them in a specific way, but rather discovering these resonances after the fact, where an image from one time and place might surprisingly happen to connect with another image from a completely different time and place. I think the fall leaf is the simpler of the two images here. I like it simply for the way the veins stretch throughout the square frame, filling it with an yellow-orange glow. The image of the spring leaf combines light shining through the leaf, creating a green glow, with light shining on the leaf, highlighting its fuzzy texture. The two images come together to form a larger “phrase” about the transition between seasons.
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