My Work

Spectacular color landscapes still charm me, although the fine-art photography world has largely moved beyond them, and they have drained into the inventories of stock image companies. In my quest for them over the years, I periodically happened upon sites with particularly bizarre formations—rock, mud, ice—which, rather than evoking an exhilarating location, pointed beyond themselves, perhaps touching something in my unconscious. As visionary photographer Minor White (1908–1976) said, “One should not only photograph things for what they are, but for what else they are.”

This is especially true of these very special places of bizarre geology: Bisti and other badlands (New Mexico, South Dakota), lava fields (Hawai’i), slot canyons (Arizona, Utah), Crack-in-the-Ground (Oregon), Little Finland (Nevada), Valley of Fire State Park (Nevada), Goblin Valley State Park (Utah), Fantasy Canyon (Utah), and also in waterfronts abroad in Ireland, Wales, France’s Ile de Ouessant, and “lunar valleys” in Sardinia and Corsica. In such places competing geological forces of uplift and erosion have left us with acres and acres of mind-boggling shapes, an open invitation for one’s imagination to transcend itself. 

Ice, instantaneous geology, comes in an endless variety of shapes, often evocative ones. I recently returned from two weeks in Iceland, where I was completely seduced by its bizarre forms—in the frozen floor of Kerið Crater, in two glacial ice caves, in streams, waterfalls, and in a huge lava tube. You´ll find them in their own gallery on this site. I also discovered that the most natural use of the 180-degree fisheye lens is to photograph the ceiling of a grotto. The result looks like a heavenly body, since the concave formation can also be read as convex.

The capture process in the field is mostly intuitive. Often I'll discover a visual reference to something in particular only after I've edited the image. However, I refrain from giving (most of) them titles in order to let the viewer's imagination lead the way.

During the initial stages of the pandemic I developed editing techniques to make my visions more explicit and powerful—while not altering the original image through composites or montages. The physical forces that created these forms (plus the incident sky) have a powerful integrity,that usually needs to be made clearer for all the elements to work together for maximum effect.