My Petrograph series consists of photographs of stones and rocks; uniting the concepts of petroglyph and photograph...
Photography captures images in time, as does fossilization or petrification...
But the time of a physical photograph and geological time are very different, though both decay and ultimately vanish....
These Petrograph images, taken in the past three years, could not be taken again; all the forms you see here have been eroded away...
Though we might think stone as lasting more than a photograph, I usually take my images in highly erosional zones, where even rock is subject to powerful annual forces of wind and waves...
For me, the Petrographs also allude to abstract painting. I was first drawn to the forms because of their 'painterly' appearances, yet they are forms that are entirely natural and 'accidental'...
Petrography is the securing, in photography, fleeting aesthetic forms in geological nature. Unlike Andy Goldsworthy's work, these are, like Duchamp, 'Found Objects'...
Sometimes the forms are strictly geological, that is derived from the physical shapes of the rock, while the colours are provided by the minerals and chemical contents of the stone and the elements involved in its weathering: iron, salt, atmosphere, myriad minerals...
Rock is not uniformly hard; and at times I find stone faces of sandstone or other weathered surfaces that seem soft in texture. I seek out not only a range of colour and form, but textures as well. At times the action of wind or water is parallel to the action of brushstrokes in a painting...
Like aerial photography, there is often an interesting confusion between negative and positive space, creating an dynamism in the illusory elements of the photograph...
I like the fact that one can't tell how far the camera is from the object. Sometimes people think, at first, that these are satellite photographs, but they vary in camera distance from six inches to sixty feet...
All of these images were taken on the sea cliffs just north of Santa Cruz, California...
The quality of the light also is an important factor; the same rock face changes its aspect moment to moment with the light...