I photograph the unspectacular. I look for oddities, scenes that don’t quite add up: A perfectly slit melon rolling back and forth in New York’s East River. A broken-off loop of graffiti scrawled along a slatted fence. Industrial structures long past their original use. Garbage and other detritus often make their way into my photographs, sometimes forming their own patterns, like scraps of dismal poetry.
I like to make my photographs a bit of a game. The subject might not always announce itself, and is sometimes more a question than a statement. It can be there and not there, like camouflage. Because I like to leave things open and a little off-kilter, I rarely photograph anything head on. I take the corner view, focusing on parts and fragments and unexpected juxtapositions.
There’s economy in photography. It’s like writing without the writing, a shorthand substituting shapes, color and light for words and phrases. I might set out with a roadmap, only to quickly discard it. I like to leave my agenda as loose and stripped of landmarks as an undiagrammed sentence. It helps me avoid dead ends.