About

As humans, we are so accustomed to rendering our world in our vision that we forget how subjective and narrow our viewpoint is. Our eyes are more capable than most mammals; your cat or dog would believe the color red to be a fiction. But our red, green, and blue is still far from the only solar truth. We are not privy to most of the light that falls upon our world, alienated further still from understanding how many common features of our environment would be fundamentally transmuted through a different lens. A camera can be made to be our eyes, peering through the veil into an alien world all our own.

I make these works out of the invisible light: the calorific rays that lie beyond red, and the oxidizers beyond violet; the two shores of the spectrum our sight is stranded between. Each piece is taken by sealing away some part of our seen world (the green, the blue, the red, or even the whole of our visible band) until what remains is the light that was hiding behind it.

These works are not a digital trick or fraud. The crimson forest, the white fire in the canopy, and the ink-black noon sky are all true, valid renderings of the natural world. All of it is always here, waiting just beyond the edge of sight.

I arrange this work as a grimoire. This is partly my temperament; I came to photography from my education in biology, and I have never been able to keep the artist and the scientist in separate rooms. The same wonder drives both worlds, and I find the old alchemical language to be a naturally fitting and compelling way to imbue that wonder back into the wild.

So each photograph is set down as an entry, a spirit called up out of the invisible world and bound here by the two things that bind anything: seeing it, and knowing its name. Beneath every spell there is a literal truth of light, and with the right tools, we can be made to see.

Process

Every photograph ever taken begins with the same fact: light is collected, focused, and etches upon its substrate an image of our world. Where my work looks to differentiate itself is in the type of light being collected: light that despite falling upon every leaf and reflected out of every pool of water is not known to us.

To accomplish this work, the traditional equipment used for photography must change. I use a camera that has been modified to be sensitive to ultraviolet and infrared light. These wavelengths are physically different than visible light, and careful consideration of lens choice, aperture setting, ISO, and environmental conditions must be followed to have a coherent output. Both the camera and the human eye are not native to perceiving these wavelengths, so it is a tedious and treacherous path to walk; seeing with your eyes will no longer be believing.

I cannot (as of yet) wholly alter my perception of the world or yours— we are locked to the red, green, and blue we are accustomed to. It is a necessary part of my work then to reassign the color identities so that infrared has some room to be observed; because it cannot simply be added to a photo, a band (or bands) of ‘normal’ color must be stripped away. Varying which part of the visible spectrum is hidden creates the different palettes that I organize into collections here.

I take great pride in personally carrying out every stage of the creation of my work. Every piece of the pipeline, from the modification of the hardware to the printing and stamping of each and every piece— even the creation of this site— is performed by me. I hope to create pieces that are not only enjoyed, but reflect something new about our world to understand and appreciate.