I hope I haven't disappointed you, but I think photography is really about a transformation. There is no verisimilitude in photography: no one-to-one relationship between a thing seen and a photograph of a thing seen. I think language and desire fill in the gaps in order for this to occur. This is not necessarily undesirable, but if we are trying to use photography as a medium, as a vehicle, then perhaps it would be better to treat a photograph as a thing seen in its own right. Please understand that my main interest is less about photography (although I dearly love photographs) than about the nature of perception. Most of the things I am involved in I try to use as a wedge of sorts, to better understand certain things. For instance, I have learned a great deal about vision through my passion for wine. We humans are so sight primary by nature that it is sometimes hard to tell what might be truly going on with what we see. All of our sense perceptions are located on the right side of the brain, and all of our rational faculties, including language, are located on the left side. So, in order for us to process our perceptions, they must make the crossing into the language side of the brain. This is why our dreams are so mercurial. Unless we make the effort to attach language to the events in our dreams (through the telling out loud or in writing them down), they fade back into the haze. So, properly speaking (according to Carlos Castaneda's don Juan), the world does not yield to us directly: language stands between us and the world. This is in no small part where the persistent sense of "a me inside here, and a world outside there" comes from. Let me illustrate my point. Let's take the examples of the sense of taste and smell. We pour a glass of wine and we take a sniff and a taste of that wine. Very often (if we're lucky) there is a whole cascade of aromas and tastes that are evoked up out of that glass: things like strawberries, currants, black cherries or violets and roses; and also things like moist earth, mown hay or the sweet smell of rotting leaves in the forest. Now none of those things are the thing itself. Notice that we say that it smells like roses, tastes of black cherries. Quite simply, I believe vision operates in exactly this same way, except that with vision we tend to take what we see as the thing itself. The important word in all of this is EVOCATIVE. To leave room for a resonance that might allow a surfacing of something whose subtleties would otherwise go unnoticed. I try to allow my photography to show me what other possibilities might exist. Since photography is not about a one-to-one relationship, why not let loose the reins a little and see what might get evoked up out of the glass of wine that is a photograph. This is my fascination with the exotic toning and the use of a cheap plastic camera - with the soft focus and dream-like imagery. All of those fancy high-tech cameras and films and the use of big negatives like an 8X10 are, in a way, hedges against transformation - trying to minimize the fact that there is no verisimilitude in photography. Please do not misunderstand what I am saying here. This is not a treatise against the use of sophisticated equipment. On the contrary, it is a treatise against our being so literal-minded and calculated in our approach to photography, here, but also in life in general. essay continued

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