“The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
— Marcel Proustart
When Ferns Remembered the Body, San Francisco, CA, 2018
2025 8x10 Exhibition (in black & white), Center for Photographic Art
Some portraits speak in hushed tones. Then some smirk while they do it. "When Ferns Remembered the Body" belongs to both camps.
The subject turns his back on us, almost as if to guard a secret or retreat into the frame. Not a drop of modesty, he exhibits his sculptured body to passersby. His back, broad and pale, seemed borrowed from a Greek statue, is interrupted by a delicate arrangement of pressed botanical forms, ferns, meadow blooms, perhaps even weeds, once living and now arrested in eternal curl. Nature itself is trying to reclaim or perhaps protect him. The leaves didn’t just obscure; they confessed. This was no ordinary man. He was every myth that ever refused to explain itself. Surrounding him: a dark, ornate frame of Victorian design, so rich in detail it almost hums with ghost stories.
What makes this portrait so unsettlingly elegant is the way the masculine form dissolves into the foliage, echoing the eternal human longing to be remembered not as a man, but as a moment. The tension between vitality and decay, between exposed skin and secret flora, hints at a theme central to the artist’s work: beauty that hides its intentions.
In creating this work, I was drawn to the idea of merging human vulnerability with botanical memory. What if the body became a specimen? What if memory wasn’t linear, but instead grew like wildflowers, crooked, inconsistent, but still capable of blooming decades later?
There’s a certain reverence in placing a body in such a frame, yes, but also mischief. Because art, like memory, is never static. It breathes. It decays. It chuckles quietly when you least expect it.
And perhaps that’s what this image is: not a photograph at all, but a preserved rumor.
Artist Statement
This work is part reliquary, part whisper. I’m interested in what remains when identity is filtered through layers of memory, nature, and cultural residue. By intertwining the human form with botanical imprints and enclosing it in a pseudo-Victorian frame, I explore the tension between vulnerability and preservation. The image speaks to our desire to be held by the past, by the earth, by meaning itself. Humor and pathos hold hands here; they are lovers in the shadows of the frame.
My work stems from an emotional urgency to preserve moments that never fully happened. I don’t create literal narratives. I distill feelings, fragments, symbols. In When Ferns Remembered the Body, I was inspired by the collision between contemporary identity and historic forms of preservation. The body becomes both muse and specimen, entangled with nature in a frame that suggests both reverence and containment. This piece speaks to intimacy, nostalgia, and our shared compulsion to archive the ephemeral. A branded waistband becomes the anchor to the present, a humorous footnote in a visual poem of fading elegance.
This image in black & white is part of the Center for Photographic Art's 2025 8x10 Exhibition in Carmel, California.
The Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, CA, is a historic fine art photography gallery founded in 1967 as the Friends of Photography by Ansel Adams, Cole Weston, and Wynn Bullock. It is the second-oldest members’ photography gallery in the U.S. and features rotating exhibits of innovative photographic works, welcoming photographers, collectors, and art enthusiasts.