Artist Statement

I came to photography through stained glass—another medium of light and color, another way of seeing the world transformed. As a retired photographer and creative director, I’ve spent decades learning that the camera is less about capturing what’s there and more about revealing what we’ve stopped noticing.

My work focuses on botanical subjects not as decoration, but as meditation. Each flower becomes a study in impermanence, form, and the play of light against darkness. I isolate my subjects—often against black backgrounds—to strip away context and invite contemplation. What remains is essential: the architecture of a petal, the gradient of color at a flower’s throat, the way light sculpts form from shadow.

This is chiaroscuro applied to the natural world. I’m drawing on the same principles Caravaggio used, but my subjects are magnolia buds and Queen Anne’s Lace rather than saints and angels. The drama is quieter, but no less profound.

Working primarily with Fujifilm cameras, I move between vivid color and monochrome, between the scientific precision of macro work and the softer poetry of natural light portraits. I photograph roses, orchids, peonies, and wildflowers—not to document species, but to ask: What does this form mean? What does this fleeting bloom have to teach about beauty, transience, structure?

My background in creative direction shapes how I work. I bring vision and architecture to the image, but I collaborate—with light, with the subject, with the moment. I wait. I observe. I let the photograph emerge rather than forcing it into being.

The philosophical questions I explore in my science fiction writing—about consciousness, perception, what it means to be “real”—show up in my photography too. When you photograph something closely enough, intimately enough, it stops being “just a flower” and becomes almost abstract, almost alien. The particular becomes universal. The ephemeral touches the eternal.

These images are invitations: to slow down, to look closer, to recognize that extraordinary beauty exists in the ordinary world, if we’re willing to truly see.

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