The photographs reproduced on this website are black & white contact prints from 4"x5" negatives. I took them with a large-format view camera, developed and printed them in my darkroom, bleached and toned them till they looked right, and mounted them on archival matboard so other people could look at them. The subjects are various, but they are mostly things that you can find outside in the vicinities of Princeton, NJ, northern VA, and the Great Smoky Mountains.

Why do I do this? Why do I go to all this trouble, when I could use a digital camera, edit the pictures in Photoshop, and slap them up on Flickr with a tiny fraction of the effort? And for that matter, why aren't there more pictures of people (preferably famous ones), and fewer of... wood? It's not because I'm a luddite or a misanthrope. Nor is it that I am an antiquarian, obsessed with old things and odd methods.

I photograph like this because it's the only way I know - certainly there are others - to make pictures that live up to, in their own small manner, the works of visual art I most admire: the etchings of Rembrandt, the paintings of Fan K'uan and Cezanne, the photographs of Atget, Eugene Smith, and Gowin, etc.

More specifically: the limitations of black & white film throw into sharp relief the formal and representational problems that make photography interesting to me. Contact printing sacrifices size and "impact" for quality of tone and sharpness of detail, in my opinion a fair trade. My range of subject matter is limited by my capacities and my inclinations (the latter always outrunning the former, unfortunately). Finally, when it comes to using a view camera rather than a hand-held one, let's just say that you'd have to pry the tripod from my cold, stiff hands.

There are other questions that I get asked, or imagine someone asking of me: Why don't you do something more relevant? How do you expect to change the world for the better, when your focus is seemingly so narrow? Is photography even art? These are tremendously difficult questions, and ones that I would prefer to answer on a personal basis, with pictures rather than with words.

As for making pictures of people... I'm working on it.

When the children on a holiday have already got through playing all their games before the clock strikes twelve and say impatiently, "Can't somebody think up a new game?" does this prove that these children are more developed and more advanced than the children of the same generation or of a previous one who could stretch out the familiar games, to last the whole day long? Or does it not prove rather that these children lack what I would call the lovable earnestness which belongs essentially to play?

Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

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