My inspiration is almost always the landscape*, but a landscape we have created, intentionally or inadvertently. It is always with an eye for the abstract. In many series, it is also documentary of a place.

Several series, e.g. Verdure and Phragmites (usually an invasive plant), are of inadvertent landscapes. By that I mean they are what has evolved after we have finished whatever project and moved on. They are mostly roadside images. Approximately half of the Rockface images are of walls that are the result of blasting for road construction. The other images in the series are from quarries.

The images of farmland, obviously an intentionally created landscape, are also about abstraction. However, I was also documenting a place. While the Tobacco series were prompted by a response to the forms, an urgency to document the fields and barns before the farms became defunct arose as that possibility seemed imminent in the early 90s.

* My use of the word 'landscape' is based in the writings of John Brinkerhoff Jackson. He went to the source word, the German landschaften, which referred to that which results when 'man' reconfigures or uses the land, in essence creating his own landscape on the natural landscape. I’ve always found this landscape of much more interest than purely natural landscapes.

Rockface

The focus on abstraction is most evident in the Rockface series: By eliminating any evidence of scale the abstract form becomes the focus.

This series links the two themes in my work: landscape and abstraction. All of the rock faces I have photographed were created by blasting through hills for construction or for granite and trap rock quarrying. The images are abstract, but they are also concerned with how our impact on the natural landscape creates an entirely new landscape.

However, to borrow a theory first voiced by the art historian Meyer Shapiro, the 'object matter' of these images is rock faces, but the 'subject matter' is abstraction.


Ohio Horizon

Photographs from Northwest Ohio

The glaciers that covered much of North America during the last ice age scraped nearly perfectly flat a huge area that includes most of Northwest Ohio and western Lake Erie. Much of this area evolved into The Great Black Swamp. It covered about 1500 square miles, forming a vague triangle stretching from Port Clinton, Ohio to Fort Wayne, Indiana and back to Toledo. It was so impenetrable that few attempts were made by anyone to even traverse it, let alone ‘develop’ it. During the so-called Toledo War in 1835-36, a conflict between Ohio and Michigan over the location of their shared border, the two militias were unable to find each other because of the swamp’s impassibility! The first known effort to clear a few acres was made around 1811, on the edge of the Sandusky River. This triggered a 100 year effort of draining the entire swamp into Lake Erie. It was a gradual process, done by incredibly motivated individuals. The only endorsement from the government came in 1859 when a series of state ‘ditch laws’ were passed that laid out the grid of ditches. The result is still some of the richest, and flattest, farmland in the Midwest.

The grid of ditches, along which most existing roads were built, forms rectangles a quarter to one mile on a side. Nearly all of these images were made looking across the rectangles, i.e. at least those distance from their subject.

After spending time in and photographing the area for a number of years, I realized that this was a subject that could only be captured and described accurately by using a technique of radically restricting the view, essentially eliminating the foreground and sky, thereby concentrating on what’s out there. Art Sinsabaugh, after struggling over how to photograph rural Illinois, and only after living in Champaign-Urbana for a while, found the heart and spirit of the Midwest landscape by reducing the field of vision to the thin strip of the horizon. My intent in this series was not to copy his work, not to make new Sinsabaugh-esque images. But, after a similar struggle, I came to the same realization.

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My wife's parents moved to Woodville in the early 1990s, less than 5 miles from Luckey, where my mother-in-law grew up. My wife's brother moved to Pemberville in 2002, 6 miles from Woodville. Many images were made either from or of my mother-in-law's cousins' farms. Without this connection, I probably never would have had the opportunity to do this work.


Tobacco

These photographs are from one of the shade tobacco farms of the Connecticut River Valley. Reputedly, the best cigar wrapper tobacco in the world is grown in this area. Hence, the nickname for the valley is "The Tobacco Valley".

With this series, my intention was to remove any connection to the political and social issues related to tobacco in order to reveal the form. Initially, I used ‘normal’ photographic formats to concentrate on the abstract angular geometry and volumes of the forms and spaces. The 360 degree panoramas go even further, transforming the barns and covers into almost unrecognizable shapes. While panoramic images present a complete image of an environment, they also break it down into separate, even more abstract elements.

In the late 1980s, when I started working on the series, it became an effort to document the farms before they disappeared, which seemed inevitable at the time. In fact, quite the opposite happened.