Brief Lives is a body of photographs which ask to what extent a place can be abstracted into ephemera. The images show 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 recurring phenomena systematically, dwelling on the same subjects in the same way over time in order to bring small differences forward.

Many 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