Brief Lives is a body of photographs which ask to what extent a place can be abstracted into ephemera. The images were made in the environment outside the house where I live: an open space called the Great Putney Meadow, which is bounded by the Connecticut River in southeastern Vermont. This place has become a frame for me to watch things come in and out of existence.

I am fascinated by the process of slowly coming to know an environment. Over the course of months and years, I study objects and processes which populate this place and surround my living space; the boundary between the two is soft. I attempt to photograph ephemera systematically, framing long-term subjects serially in order to bring forward differences which develop over time.

Most of these images are the result of material experimentation. I work with simple, nearly characterless materials which reflect the quality of light and air around them. There are lumen images of my breath, the quality of light as a subject-in-itself, flower petals, sheets of opal glass, obscura projections of my windows and doors, deep ruts in the field, and the swallows that migrate and nest here. I am interested in what happens when a representation of a place becomes a small world of its own.

May 2023 - Ongoing