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    Statement - Portfolio One

    Pinhole photography is the most quiet and satisfying technique that I have practiced in 20 years of camera work. I use a rangefinder camera fitted with a pinhole-drilled body cap in place of the usual glass lens. My exposures are hand-held and range from ½ a second in full sun to 3 or 4 minutes in fading light. Both involve my nearly still body and a long meditative steadying of the camera. It is a great joy to silently count off seconds while imagining the silver record accumulating behind that tiny gleaming aperture. 
     

    My movement during these long exposures and the optical quality of the pinhole softens and diffuses the scene in front of me. Furthermore, I choose places and compositions with which I feel a strong empathy. The active merging of this intuition with the syntax of my technique, along with a desire to work silently and unencumbered, produce this body of work.  These digital reproductions represent an excerpt of the toned, gelatin-silver print portfolio.  

     

    Enter

     

     

        
     
                                                   

    Statement - Portfolio Two

    I have spent several summers traveling through Europe.  Like a birder with a life-list I tour to experience and study the paintings, sculptures, and architecture important in the history of art.  My companions are always the same:  the ghosts of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Eugène Atget, as well as my wife Lori. 

    I work in both color and black and white depending on the subject.  I used a 35mm film camera for most of the black and white work.  I used a Canon 5D Mark II for the color work.  Finally, these digital reproductions represent an excerpt of two physical portfolios:  one toned, gelatin-silver print body of work and a second color, ink-jet-printed body of work.

    Jeffrey at Carcassonne

     

     

                                               
    Statement - Portfolio Three

    “I want you to play that again, only this time make it faster, but slower.”

    Martin Hannett, to the members of Joy Division, during the recording of Unknown Pleasures, 1977

     

    In the spring of 2017 I sat in the passenger seat of my father-in-law’s car, camera in hand, watching Willamette Valley riverscapes scroll past my window. As the light was storm-perfect, my impulse was to ask for photography pull-overs. There were so many fine subjects that I mentally had our touring company stopping every mile or so. This seemed an obnoxious request, so I didn’t speak up. Frustrated, I set my Fuji X100-F camera to a 1/1000th of a second shutter speed, thinking that this would eradicate any car movement from the world around me. I didn’t take a single exposure. This was just silly. How was I supposed to compose or know my subjects at 45 miles per hour? 

    Impish?

    Inspired?

    In a moment of grace, I thought, or rather just felt, why not set the shutter slow and work with the movement? That seemed an honest response to a fast landscape. A car-window world of unfolding flower fields, barns, branches, and blurs. This would be my subject, and I took around 200 pictures that afternoon. 

    For several weeks I didn’t look at the work; I was afraid of failure. When I found my courage, and when I saw that first post-impressionist smear of green, yellow, and orange, I began laughing. This is why I am a photographer: experimentation, beauty, surprise, & joy.

     

    		         Faster but Slower