Half-Light and Magic

In my photography, I’m most interested in capturing, through unstaged shots taken while walking about, the line between the actual and the immaterial. I’m fascinated by a half-world, of phantasms and allegory, found fleetingly on the street; glimpses of daily mystery and revelatory gestures and expressions that if I’m fast and good enough, my camera can catch.

I’m also deeply interested in color and form, and the way the two elements fall on the page. Even when a photo is rich in historical significance—such as those in my first photobook, OWS—I’m still preeminently concerned with color and form. I certainly don’t mind photos that have qualities associated with a classic beauty, yet, as in my Angel Parade series, I like to bend, twist, and blur that beauty.

I’m also more interested in photobooks than single photos; that is, the flow and “story” of a series of photos, the cumulative effect of the whole collection. I spend a lot of time figuring out which photos should go into a specific book, and why, and which is the richest order for those photos. The process is more intuitive than ratiocinative. For me, ideally, a great photobook is like a strong story collection or grouping of poems—each piece good in its own right, but better as part of a whole.

I’ve been deeply inspired by Japanese photography, in particular the Provoke masters such as Daido Moriyama, Takuma Nakahira, and Masahisa Fukase. In my own work, I hope to capture their energy, passion, and mystery, but not as they did in black and white but instead in color.

I’m always hoping to capture singularly affecting photos: ones that stop a viewer, jazz them up, pull them out of their own consciousness into my world of half-light and magic.

For more on my photographic work—and to see all my photobooks—please go to Ecstatic Light Photos.