Lots

These pictures are the work of a young artist.

They were begun in school. I was technically the oldest student in my graduate program, having spent my twenties as a poet in New York, choosing poetry over photography mostly because of the reduced cost (and never considering the reduced reward). You only need pencils to be a poet, and you can steal those from mini golf. I had only begun making pictures again in earnest for a year or so before applying to graduate school, but the switch to photography was as freeing as hearing your own language again, stepping off the plane from a long trip abroad. I felt like a cheetah released back into the wild.  

I went to Florida because it’s warm. I had begun to shoot at night, a wind photographers lean into around the autumn equinox. As the days get shorter, tripods start to look genteel.  Photographing at night is comforting because there are fewer choices. You have to go toward the light, and at night the light is purely, deeply human: it was put there by someone, so it means something. Daylight belongs to everything. The daylight you see out your window right now looks the same as it will when bittersweet vines have torn down all of human civilization. Artificial light is the essence of what we’ve built, from Pinnacle Point to Pinkberry, and imagination has glowed by keeping out the dark. The light we make is the mark of our ambition. I started spending Christmastimes photographing in Florida, where it’s warm, even at night. 

Some of these images were initially published in the monograph, Lots, from Coromandel Design, and more are now available in Red Clay, from Fall Line Press, and this blurb is taken from an essay therein.