Built from Memory: My Essays on Photography, Music, and the Unseen
I believe that a photograph is not a record of what happened. It is a collection of what remains: a fragment of memory, a trace of music, a shadow that lingers. Rooted in the Monterey Peninsula and shaped by a background in classical piano and painting, these essays draw on musical form, art history, and hands-on experiments, from cyanotypes to lumens. My aim is to offer curators, editors, and general readers alike an introspective view of how my layered, multi-exposure work is conceived and why it matters to me. To follow new essays as they are published, please subscribe to my Substack.
A paddle stops being a paddle the moment it stops moving. What's left isn't stillness. It's tension with nowhere to go.
September 15, 2026
This week's essay uses five of my photographs to explore Anima Mundi, the old idea that the world itself might be a living thing with a soul. Rather than a history lecture, it's a personal walk through the idea: what it feels like to go looking for a soul in the landscape with nothing but a camera.
September 8, 2026
I reflect on photography as an act of selective concealment, where the most consequential decisions happen at the edges of the frame. Using two of my images, a shadowed figure watching a half-glimpsed dancer, and a trailer nearly swallowed by a tree, I sketch out the competing stories each image's omissions make possible, and argue that a picture's silences are where a viewer's imagination is meant to do its work.
September 1, 2026
For Pinot Noir Day, I revisit a set of still-life shadow studies made with nothing more than a bottle, a wall, and failing light — and find, in hindsight, that the grape's own contradictions (thin-skinned, monastic, communal, mutable) had quietly written themselves into the compositions. A meditation on ambiguity, patience, and the strange dignity of a silhouette.
August 18, 2026
To mark the 75th Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, I revisit Auto Erotica, a body of work built from close-up photographs of vintage automobiles taken on early Pebble Beach mornings in 2008–2009, mirrored and arranged into panel grids where individual fragments — a headlamp, a wheel, a curve of fender — dissolve into new, symmetrical forms. The piece is a meditation on fragmentation, Gestalt perception, and why the whole panel says something no single photograph of the car ever could.
August 11, 2026
Two photographs became one, and I still can't tell you where the woman ends and the flowers begin. I don't think I'm supposed to be able to. New essay on why I stopped explaining my images.
August 5, 2026
Prompted by an odd detail in a New York Times piece on how AI chatbots answer open-ended questions, I went looking for why blue — trusted, sacred, melancholy, and calm all at once — is the color so many of us reach for without ever agreeing to. Five new images trace that duality, from an heirloom-toned field of indigo blossoms to a single ember glowing inside a dark blue field.
August 18, 2026
I examine a quote from Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies — that art should "startle the viewer into thinking about the meaning of life" — through two new photographic works built in conversation with Tàpies' early matter paintings and later meditative gestures. The piece asks whether quiet, contemplative art can carry the same jolt as Tàpies' raw, material-driven canvases.
July 21, 2026
After judging a camera club's diptych-themed competition, I turned my own scoring criteria back on four of my own paired images, with far less flattering results than I'd hoped for. One entry failed outright — it wasn't actually a diptych — while another earned a perfect score for letting color temperature carry real conceptual weight. In between, I relearned something painting, music, and photography have all been trying to teach me for twenty years: a diptych's meaning doesn't live in either panel, it lives in the gutter between them.
July 14, 2026
With fireworks banned across my part of the Central Coast, I went looking through my own archive for a cleaner alternative — images built from flowers, bare branches, and layered light that borrow the visual language of an explosion without any of its toxic fallout. Along the way: Handel's ill-fated 1749 fireworks premiere, Whistler's infamous fireworks painting, and five images that celebrate 250 years of independence without lighting a single fuse.
July 7, 2026
A dried sunflower, turned away from the viewer, becomes an examination of what is withheld rather than shown. The essay moves through four movements: the compositional pressure of the surrounding darkness; a parallel with a Chopin's Nocturne, where ornamentation intensifies rather than decorates silence; the collapsed leaf at the base as a figure of unremarked exhaustion; and a structural analysis of the image. The piece ends without resolution.
June 30, 2026
In this piece, I reveal a series of seven photographs built on a single unremarkable subject — a bare tree against a concrete block wall. Through layering, tonal transformation, and deepening complexity, the same theme can yield radically different emotional pieces. Drawing on the classical music tradition of theme and variations (Bach, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Brahms, Monet), I make the case that visual art gains something profound when it adopts music's discipline of returning: the willingness to ask, again and again, what else is hiding inside this?
June 23, 2026