Montage / Experimental /

In 1981-82 I made a series of photographs entitled, Photomontage. The series began because I was willing to experiment. I was walking the streets of my neighborhood with a medium format camera, recording whatever moved me. I did not have a project or anything in mind–just walking and photographing. I had a darkroom in my apartment and made a few 11x14 prints that I then tacked up on my studio wall. One night, looking at the prints, I realized that 2 of the photographs looked like they might physically fit together. I immediately grabbed my matt knife, cut one image along the vertical shape of a tree trunk & flipped that over to use as a template to cut out the 2nd photo, to join them together. Bam ! I loved it. Then I went out shooing with the aim of combining images in my mind.

Photomontage consists of a suite of 12 photographs.

Once I completed my Photomontage series above, I made the, Darkroom Diptychs, series below. These are 2 contact prints (on 8x10 inch paper) made with two 2 1/4 inch black & white negatives. I constructed a simple framing device to print these in alignment onto the photo paper.

These 2 projects taught me a valuable lesson. It is, that once we make something and see it, it is ours. In other words, making both the Photomontages & the Darkroom Diptychs increased my visual vocabulary and my perceptual skills and I began to see and photograph the world in a different way.

PHOTOGRAPHY is a one of a kind book I made at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, where I received my M.F.A. It consists of folded paper sheets upon which I applied photographs, negatives, and pencil marks.

In 2018, I made a series of 4x5 inch pinhole paper negatives, which I then contact printed. Both the negatives & the 8 x 10 inch contact prints were made on Kodak Azo paper. These are from a series of 25 photographs.

Napkins & T.P. is a little project I made on the scanner. I saved napkins & toilet paper from a trip I did with 2 of my colleagues and our University of Southern Maine art students. We went to Documenta and to many other galleries and museums in France and Germany.