Documenting our Landscape

Surrealism is destructive…the same can be said about photography when the image interrogates the limitations of one’s taken-for-granted’s, one’s closely held beliefs that are formed without interrogation through the exteriority of constant exposure. One of the tasks of the photographer, it seems to me, is to wrestle with those iconic notions that have free access to our trace memories without serious challenge. The photograph is a vehicle to challenge one’s deeply held notions about life, values, culture, family, society, and so on. Because the photographic image purports to represent something that is real, even though that is, in itself, a deception, it is in a perfect position to quietly ask visual questions that attack, assault, assail, condemn and savage the iconic message contained on the surface of the two dimensional reduction of the three dimensional.