Distillation

At its root, “Distillation” recognizes that photography is an experiment in futility. We attempt to capture a place, a moment, an emotion, by fixing on paper or in digital form that which is always evaporating, always fugitive. This is inherent in all photography: what we photograph ceases to exist exactly as it's been captured the moment the shutter closes.

The images are fragments of larger photographs I've made over decades. By mining my work—using it as a personal archive—I endeavor to rethink, recapture, or “re-remember” something about the sites and how I experienced them. Though abstracted from larger images, these fragments testify, "I was there. I saw this. I felt something."

The title of each image has two parts. The first is a cataloging tag that begins with the designation “EQ.” This is a nod to Alfred Stieglitz’s “Equivalents” series, in which he offered abstract images of clouds as corollaries of emotional experience. “More than describing the visible surfaces of things, the works could express pure emotion, paralleling the artist’s own inner state.”1 Each title in “Distillation” also contains a word or phrase denoting the context for the image. So, while I hope to elicit the emotional memory connected to the image, and I also want to maintain a link to the place in which I made it. I do not want to erase the fact that I was present in a specific time at a specific place and tried to record it.