I photograph the unspectacular. I look for oddities, scenes that don’t quite add up: A perfectly slit melon rolling back and forth in New York’s East River. An incomplete loop of graffiti scrawled along a slatted fence. A pair of sandals with brightly colored baubles abandoned on the sidewalk. Industrial structures long past their original use. Garbage and other detritus often make their way into my photographs, sometimes forming their own patterns, like scraps of dismal poetry.
I like to make my photographs a bit of a game. The subject might not always announce itself, and is sometimes more a question than a statement. It can be there and not there, like camouflage. Because I like to leave things open and a little off-kilter, I rarely photograph anything head on. I take the corner view, focusing on parts and fragments and unexpected juxtapositions.
There’s economy in photography. It’s like writing without the writing, a shorthand, substituting shapes, color and light for words and phrases. I might set out with a roadmap, only to quickly discard it. I like to leave my agenda as loose and stripped of landmarks as an undiagrammed sentence. It helps me avoid dead ends.