Artists

I love film and shoot primarily with homemade pinhole and 1960’s plastic toy cameras. The fun of shooting low-tech is the unpredictability of the resulting images, images that cannot be choreographed or reproduced and are only discovered later in the darkroom. There are no exposure or focus controls: to zoom in you walk closer, to zoom out you lean backwards, auto exposure is “click.” I discover many of the images for my photography driving around back streets and back roads. I find beauty in the abandoned. I am attracted to images of desolation or solitude – fodder for the soft-focused interpretations created by the plastic and pinhole lenses. And although the imperfection of the lenses results in a great number of failed (and lost) shots, there is a certain excited thrill attached to taking photos and not knowing how they will come out until I process the film. I recently moved to Buffalo from Greenville, South Carolina where I lived for the past 15 years working at the great Metropolitan Arts Council, a non-profit arts organization that advocated and supported the thriving arts community in Greenville. In Greenville I also founded, directed and taught at the WestEnd Darkroom Photo School. And most importantly, I had a beloved darkroom in one of the many artist collective spaces in the city.