Although fascinated by the spectacle that the world can offer, I did not chose photography because I am not so much interested in the “thing in itself” while it stands in front of the camera, in extracting the “essence of things.” No, I choose photography, or rather, photography chose me because it forces me to leave the studio–I used to love drawing and painting–because it forces me to be more aware of my environment, to engage it.

Photographing develops a keen sense of observation. In order to become a good photographer one has to establish a constant dialogue with the world. As in human relationships, the heart, the mind, and the eye are the key tools. The heart is what guides a first response to subject matter: it can simply be an esthetic emotion, although the more sophisticated my practice has become the more this response has been an instant acknowledgement of form (esthetics), and content.
In photography form is not just about the recognition of shapes, lines, composition (ordering the apparent chaos of the world), it is also about light. Composition and light are the tools, the syntax if you please, of the visual message that lies between the two dimensions of the frame, fixing the third one discrete but present: time. They allow the photographers to formulate their responses, their emotions, their ideas, to give them existence, form, to communicate content.
Content is both a product of one’s analysis and understanding of subject matter, the immediate emotional and intellectual response to the world in front of one’s eye, and the projection of associated emotions and ideas. The process runs deeply, both conscious and subconscious, thence, in order to join and participate the spectator has to be aware of the metaphoric power involved in creating images, even photographs that ingenuously seem to only depict what is in front of the camera. “Landscape pictures can offer us, I think, three verities¬,” the photographer and essayist Robert Adams wrote, “geography, autobiography, and metaphor. […] The three kinds of information strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact, an affection for life.”

Consider Entropy #1 as my attempt to express my, sometimes challenged, “affection for life.” It is about the geography of a place, along the now abandoned stretch of route 66 that lies between Grand Canyon and Las Vegas, two icons of American culture, two sides of the same paradox. It shows, raw to the naked eye, how the west was made: vast expanses of semi-desert land without a sense of property or boundaries that were fenced by “reason” (the grid), greed and violence, symbolized here by barbed wire. Barbed wire defines property, territory, violent limits to freedom whether it be movement, emotion, or thought. Submitted to confinement, emotions and thoughts find themselves curtailed; they dry up running the risk of dying. Structure can help organization and communication, life in society. Authoritarian and violent structures kill the human spirit, generate suspicion and fear, and ultimately a violent response of the entrapped spirit before it is destroyed. The last concept at play here is one we cannot escape and that links time and entropy (the loss of energy), the constant evolution of everything that is. Once a symbol of a thriving economy, of the “go west” drive, this billboard by the side of the road, on the other side of the fence, has become a prey to, and a part of the elements: sun, wind, rain. At core, photographs are about contemplation...of one's life.