Spending time in nature has always been one of my favorite activities. It has a way of calming my spirit and rekindling my sense of joy and wonder. It's a great reminder that there are reasons to be optimistic, even when the world seems complicated. As a photographer it is a gift to be able to witness, capture and share the amazing parenting skills of sandhill cranes caring for their colt, the beauty of a tree in four different seasons or the simple shadows of plants in the snow. And the best part is there is always a reason to return to nature because it is never the same place twice.
No matter where I go I enjoy observing people and their environments. The photographs in this collection capture some of the people, places and things I've seen during my travels and closer to home. Some images are playful and fun, some show an intimate relationship or moment, and others are more documentary in nature. What they have in common is that they all focus on positive aspects of life and not the dark, depressing subject matter of much street photography.
There are times when my eye focuses more on the shapes, patterns and light around me than on the actual "things" around me. This way of seeing brings into focus details that have been there all along but were missed because of a tendency to focus on the bigger picture. I enjoy making abstract images because they make the overlooked more obvious, the mundane more special, and create surprises for those viewing them.
I feel lucky to live in Wisconsin where we have four seasons, wonderful State Parks, forests, natural areas, proximity to the Great Lakes, and ties to legendary naturalists such as John Muir and Aldo Leopold. Add to that a beautiful Capital City enhanced by the Arts and the UW-Madison Campus, and it's hard not to find beauty everywhere I look.
The landscape photographs in this project feature the types of scenes we are accustomed to seeing every day. However, instead of presenting them in a straightforward way, I have chosen to give them a dreamy quality that emphasizes the lines, tonality and inherent beauty in nature. This approach is reminiscent of Pictorialism, an aesthetic movement in photography popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It focused not on the documentation of reality, but rather on the belief that a photograph could create beauty and an emotional response.
Botanical artwork can be traced as far back as cave paintings. It remains a popular subject today, represented in a variety of different media. This series is a blend of the old and the new. It's a marriage of the traditional and the contemporary. It retains a little bit of the classic style and adds a little bit of the Bohemian style...and that's how it earned it's name, "Boho-tanical."
