Artist’s Statement

Since 1910, abstract imagery has been seen as the domain of painting by much of the art world. In fact, a number of eminent photographers—Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray, Brassaï—were making abstract photographs over a century ago. The first intentionally abstract photograph was made in 1916—six years after the first abstract painting.

My photographs are of weathered surfaces, objects, graffiti, handbills, and paint found on walls, lampposts, and doors in the streets of Brooklyn, New York, Los Angeles, and Medellín among others.

In the process of photographing a surface or object and eliminating any reference to its physical context or size, it is abstracted and transformed into something that exists in an intangible realm of color, composition, shape, and mood. When printed, the image is transformed anew into physical form—a still photograph of a found object.

The phrase objêt trouvé (found object) describes an object—which is not normally considered material from which art is made—found by an artist, which with minimal modification is then presented as a work of art. I see my work in the Objêt Trouvé tradition that emerged in France and Germany after WW1. In Germany, Kurt Schwitters asserted that common material, such as newsprint, fabric, and discarded wire mesh were as valid in making fine art as oil paint or marble. In France, Marcel Duchamp exhibited a porcelain urinal to challenge the Academe’s arbitrary constraints on creativity. Brassaï, a Hungarian, published photographs of graffiti he’d found in the streets of Paris in 1933 and described them as ‘les objêts trouvé’.

While I use a camera to make these images, I believe it is the final work that matters, not how it was made or whether it’s a painting, a collage, or a photograph. I make photographs of commonplace and consequently “invisible” surfaces as a means of exploring the alchemy of imagination.