About Field Studies
Field Studies returns the human form to earth – to weather, to terrain, and to the vicissitudes of outdoor geography and place. The photographs presented here are a direct counterpoint to my studio work, which works by other rules: uniform backdrops, controlled light, the body considered in isolation as a problem of line and weight.
In Field Studies, geography and place are doing half the work, and sometimes more.
The images in Field Studies were made in a handful of environments: sandstone slot canyons in the Southwest, dried cracked earth, an open grassland under a moving sky, the still surface of a pond, and beneath the branches of a tree.
Each location works with the human form differently. Sandstone frames the figure the way studio paper cannot – irregular shadow and organic texture pressed against skin. Cracked earth flattens into a graphic field, and the body folds into it like an ornament. Tall grass crops and conceals. Water reflects and reduces the figure to a torso above its reflection.
I’m less interested in framing the figure on a landscape than I am with the idea of the figure embedded in one – the body returned to the natural elements that a traditional studio excludes.