I climbed a hill overlooking a pedestrian pathway and created three separate panels with my image by including the three trees that move diagonally through the frame. I photographed many people moving in opposite directions along the sidewalk, but the picture did not work as expression until the dog walker at center veered off the path and headed away from me into the barren field between the trees. At that same moment, a couple was walking through the left hand panel, while a single pedestrian was just about the leave the third panel at far right. The couple walks to left in unison, the dog follows its walker off into the field, and the single pedestrian at right charges the image with jarring tension by touching the edge of the picture with both a toe and an arm. Each party also appears different from the others – the man at left wears bright red vest that energizes the image, the person leaving the image at right wears a checked purple shirt, and both the walker and her dog appear in neutral black. The photograph speaks of the contrasting differences between the users of a park, as well as the multitude of contrasting options a park can offer. All who come to use it march to the beat of their own drums.

Two men walking past me suddenly diverged, each of them taking a different route to enter the great yellow cathedral at dusk. It was raining lightly, and the men were in a hurry. They are dressed very much alike, yet it seems that they have opposite objectives in mind as they mount separate steps for the evening service. It might symbolize the very nature of religion itself – people can take divergent paths to faith, each marching to the beat of their own drum.

The 43 story US Bancorp Tower is the second tallest skyscraper in Portland. It is known as “Big Pink” because of its color, and an album by “The Band.” It is the largest office building in Oregon in terms of volume. Portland’s top grossing restaurant, offering the best views of the city, occupies its thirtieth floor. Several blocks away is the Union Gospel Mission, which as been feeding the homeless and restoring the lives of addicts since 1927. I juxtapose the two structures, anchoring the image with one of downtown Portland’s signature Victorian light poles. They are polar opposites in that one structure celebrates wealth and the other exists because of poverty. Yet the rain clouds that drift across the image seem to unite them both, given the context of Portland’s current economic dislocations.

A satellite dish is overwhelmed by a tangle of utility wires, a stark contrast in technologies. I surround the dish with the glow of the setting sun. The golden light also bathes a building in the background – its rebars tell us that construction, like technology, moves at it own timeless pace in the small desert towns of North Africa.

The oil painting, by Arizona cowboy artist Lon Megargee, was hung in the Arizona State Capitol Building in 1913, a year after Arizona joined the Union. The painting depicts the old west, with its monumental rock forms and an Indian on horseback moving towards us. The painting hangs in one of the old capitol’s tiny offices, now part of an Arizona historical museum. A derby hangs next to it on a coat rack. By leaning as far as I could to the right, I was able to merge the hat into the painting itself, an incongruous juxtaposition of opposing ways of life. The derby evokes the urbane style of 1913's eastern cities, while the painting offers a nostalgic western dreamscape that by 1913 had already become lost to memory.

An Islamic woman at first seems to be lost in a sea of men on this Jaipur street corner. I cropped their heads off to stress the point. Yet there are several contradictions at work in this image. The woman may be alone and seemingly vulnerable, yet her body language makes her look utterly confident. Her vividly colored clothing calls attention to her, yet nobody seems to look her way. Her masked face hides her identity, while her eyes seem to examine everything around her. She wears a costume that goes back in time, while surrounded by machines that point to the future. She is outnumbered here ten to one, yet she is the one who seems to be in charge.

I found this woman asleep on a stone slab in a Hanoi Park. I wanted to go beyond the cliché image so often made of homeless people sleeping in public places. To do so, I moved into a position where I needed to add context by juxtaposing the sleeping subject with someone who was extremely active. I did not have long to wait. The park is a favorite exercise spot, and a runner quickly came into view. I create a series of layers using the tree, bench and sleeping woman to anchor the composition. The ground changes from grass to stone at a second tree. An expanse of stone tile stretches into the background of the image. In the midst of it is a runner. The sleeping woman faces us, while the runner does not. The two figures are complete opposites in activity level, scale, and orientation. I hope this juxtaposition of opposites will trigger the imaginations of those who view this image, and each viewer will make of it what they wish.

Many of the tombs in this cemetery are embellished with ceramic landscapes. Leaves, both dead and alive, blanket the gravesites. The presence of new growth amidst the dead leaves is a relationship of opposites. And the presence of the idyllic ceramic landscape on a gravestone is the opposite of what we might expect, as well.

I found this cat resting on the hood of a Mercedes just outside of the National Archaeology Museum. While cats can be found underfoot everywhere in Morocco, I had not seen one with such discerning taste. Its choice of bed is contradictory – within moments the driver will probably return, gun the engine, and send it scurrying away. As for its choice of make, a Mercedes would not normally be the first choice of an alley cat.

These massive sandstone buttes were named after the two ironclad battleships that fought each other to a standoff during the American Civil War. The buttes look like the prows of those ships, and when the skies are filled with leaden clouds resembling cannon fire, the battle seems to be joined. I under exposed this image to deepen the color of both clouds and ships, bringing the ships to battle, even if in the imagination. Opposites? Indeed.

Eleven carp encircle a single duck in the crystal clear waters of one of the park’s 16 magical lakes. There are a number of opposites and contradictions present in this luminous image. First of all, its 11 against one, but the one has a decided size advantage. They may share the same water at the same moment, but these fish don’t seem to be concerned about the duck, while the duck completely ignores the fish. They could be its wallpaper! There are similarities as well. All seem to effortlessly share a life in this water, and notice how the duck’s tail seems to be formed very much in the same shape as a fish tail. What we see here is nature at work – the fish must find some benefit from hanging around a duck, while the duck does not seem to mind all the company.

“ART Santa Fe” is an international contemporary art fair, bringing dealers, artists and art collectors from all over the world together for four days each year. Held in the city’s Sweeney Convention Center, the essence of the show is the sheer size and variety of its offerings. I used the principle of contradiction to make this image incongruous and expressive. Shooting with a 24mm wideangle lens from a balcony ringing the second floor of the building, I walked around the huge show until I could find a single person to contrast to the maze of illuminated yet abstracted booths. And I found her. Here she is, surrounded by the creativity of her clients, quietly awaiting her potential customers. The seemingly endless racks of spotlights, the glowing white walls of the various booths, the curving darkness beyond, all play against this solitary figure, the focal point of the image and a striking example of contradiction expressed through scale incongruity. She is utterly alone in an image filled with scores of abstracted possibilities.

It was shockingly contradictory to turn the corner of this narrow, winding 15th century street to find a wall so vividly painted with 21st century graffiti. I was not expecting to find it. It plays past against the present, and asks the viewer to weigh the values implied. The so-called “light at the end of the tunnel” effect implies relief from oppressive confinement of the past, yet offers the chaos of the present instead.

As I walked Ghent’s historic Graslei at dusk, a vast promenade along the site of the city’s medieval harbor, I viewed numerous people sharing wine and companionship in the many outdoor cafes lining the River Leie. Using a 432mm telephoto lens, I compress several tables into my frame, creating great density and comparing the expressions of the patrons from table to table. The social interplay at this Happy Hour gathering seems to be quite the opposite from what we might ordinarily expect. The expressions range from passively solemn to actively serious. I leave it to the imagination of my viewers to draw their own conclusions from this contradictory image.

A huge mural of a weeping woman offers a contradictory context for the clothes displayed on this mannequin. There are several other opposites as well here – the huge scale of the intimate mural contrasts to the smaller, coldly indifferent plaster model. The grainy texture of the mural differs from the crisp reality of the actual display. My camera position has caused the woman in the mural to weep directly onto the shoulders of the mannequin. There are more questions here than answers. What might this image mean to you?

Rembrandt’s best known work is the Night Watch, painted in 1642 – the first major work of art portraying its subjects in motion. Nearly 500 years later, the huge canvas dominates an entire wall of a room in the Rijksmuseum, a target for a never-ending parade of digital snapshooters. I applied my own pixels to this act of contradiction – electronically recording another photographer in the act of digitally mimicking the brush strokes of one of the greatest artists who ever lived. By removing the floor she stands on, I have also inserted her squarely into a niche of available space in the middle of the image itself. The photographer’s body language corresponds to the action in the painting -- the militia’s young female mascot avidly watches the photographer, while the fellow wearing the ruffled collar waves his hand directly at her camera as if to invite her to the party. Still another contradiction is the clashing color – the painting reflects the somber colors of the 17th century, while the photographer’s lavender shirt is very much in the palette of the 21st. Because of the low light in the gallery, I used ISO 400, which fortuitously adds a grainy texture to the photographer – making it almost seem as if she, too, has been made of brush strokes.

The home and studio of the great Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens from 1610 to 1640 still stands in the center of Antwerp. I noticed a small glass building, just across the plaza from the Rubens house, featuring a facsimile of the artist’s self-portrait in its window. By using a wideangle lens close to that portrait, I filled almost half the frame with it, and then waited for a person to enter the other half. I seek a contradiction in time here – the great painter matched to an anonymous contemporary passer-by. I also establish a contradiction in scale by making the poster much larger than the body of the pedestrian. I use the diagonal line of beige tiles in the plaza as a linkage thread, timing my shot so that the walking figure steps on that line leading directly to the Rubens portrait. I also simultaneously insert the oblivious pedestrian into building as a reflection, further linking him to Rubens. He looks about the same age as the great artist was when he painted his own portrait. They may be four hundred years apart in time, yet both wear similar beards, and although he turns his back to the oblivious passer-by, Rubens appears to sense that he is there. In a final contradiction, the pedestrian seems to walk in two directions at once – forwards and backwards. He becomes, for the moment anyway, a traveler in time.