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 and joined them together. Bam ! I loved it. I then went out shooing with the aim of combining images in my mind.

My Photomontage consists of a suite of 12 photographs. Each image is made from 2 or 3 frames.

Once I completed the Photomontage series above, I made the, Darkroom Diptychs, series below. These are 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 this — that once we make something and see it, it is ours. Making both the Photomontages and the Darkroom Diptychs increased my visual vocabulary and my perceptual skills and I began to see and photograph the world in a different way, even in a single frame.

PHOTOGRAPHY is from 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. Cover & 14 folded pages.

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 made at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, while I was in residence there. See my previous daily in residency project made at Mac Dowell in 1985.

Napkins & T.P. is a project I made on the scanner. I saved napkins and toilet paper from a trip I made 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.