Vegetable Matter

I grew up fascinated by nature. Living near a large wooded area and a lake, I spent all the time I could exploring and studying the plants and animals around me. I would memorize their tiniest details so I could then attempt to identify them with the help of a set of encyclopedias in my childhood home. At some point I convinced my mother to let me use her camera, a simple 110 film camera that started my love affair with photography, but also failed to get me the detailed images of flowers and leaves and mushrooms and animals that I wanted so much to capture. The camera had a fairly wide angle lens so I could capture expansive swaths of the landscape but I wanted the details. My thoughts were about the individual species, the individual flower petals, the color of the scales, the shape of the beak. Nature was a series of unrelated and distinct items to me. This allowed me to think of this single patch of woods as “nature”, as “wild”, while ignoring how truly artificial and manmade it was. It contained bits and pieces of nature, but very little of it was natural. I was the perfect example of not being able to see the forest for the trees.

We see nature where only bits and pieces of nature actually exist. We isolate the individual parts of nature because the totality is difficult to comprehend. Artists and photographers create still lifes, landscapes, and wildlife images that either focus all of our attention on a singular part of the natural world or create entirely new scenes with items from nature. Rarely do we encounter art that looks at nature in a broader way.

I have taken this same approach with my photography of things we think of as “natural”. I focus on isolating and simplifying. I focus on details and forms and colors. I reduce everything down as much as possible and try to make it as easily digestible as possible. I don't take photos of flowers and leaves, I take portraits of flowers and leaves. I do this because this is what people want. I also do this because I hope that if I can reduce things enough in my photographs it will start to become obvious that everything else is missing.