ARTIST'S STATEMENT

My photographs are about place—interior spaces and exterior landscapes, natural and built, real and constructed, where they intersect and what happens when they do. Because of the mutability of place, my work is also about time through observations of transformation and the ephemeral. I return to specific locations over months and sometimes years, revisiting, observing and photographing the changes within the static structure of a site, resulting in images that are evocative and somewhat mysterious despite my straightforward approach. 

I'm also a writer. My practice is not as a documentarian or historian, but as a storyteller and poet who at times relies on history or existing texts as a basis for a personal or alternate narrative of place. I resist a sublime, romantic or elegiac telling of these landscapes, as they were forbidding, abject, polluted and dangerous sites. My objective is to offer the viewer the ability to visit and return to these difficult or disappeared places through photo bookworks that permits one to linger, look and contemplate the complexity and poetics of these sites.

My earliest practice in the mid-1970's began with abstract filmmaking and set-up photography that relied on found light, shifting perspective, ordinary materials and found objects. I employed the theater of sets and the transformative nature of the lens to make images that I offer as visual poems, such as in the portfolio Night By Night. This work coincided with my industrial landscape photography presented in Work Sites/Work Cites, influencing its framing and presentation. I've always been interested in the details of ordinary or forgotten places through photography and how it permits durational viewing of a site. I was influenced by Michael Snow's film Wavelength in this regard, for the revelations that slow, sustained watching can provide. In the case of my landscape work, durational viewing was permitted me only through these images as the sites were too dangerous for me to remain for very long, yet there was an urgency to photograph them as the structures were often in the process of disappearing. The prints in particular are artifact/objects of what I call "ghost sites" where holding them allows me to revisit these places and linger on details that offer new insights with each encounter. Despite the static aspect of still images, I strive for a depth beyond simple depiction or documentation in all my work through material culture, the handling of these works and repeated viewing. More about these landscapes can be read in the Work Sites/Work Cites Introduction essay.

I continue to work primarily in b/w film-based photography in a range of formats and am hands-on with my lab and studio work. The material aspects of hand-made photography are central to my work, but I also use digital processes in combination with the analog. I employ photogravure printmaking, letterpress printing, handmade papers and hand-binding for use in photo bookworks that offers the viewer a haptic experience of the image that is absent from screen-based media. In the present moment, I've returned to my studio set-up photography, revisiting what I put on hold so many years ago, and to work with color from time-to-time. I remain interested in composing structures and spaces that only exist in these images. They are titled with one-line poems that are evocative, extracted from various texts that resonate with me. A new body of work, Signals From A Veiled State, contains my first color photography. This work in progress will eventually be added to this site as it develops further.

As I compile these photographs into image/object/poem sequences contained in book forms, the various materials and craft practices are essential to realizing my work. I think through making. I work, evaluate, and rework until a distinct presence arrives. The materials transition into content with the book form as the setting for reception. The image/object/poem is transmitted through presence and physicality. Paper is not simply substrate, it's content; ink has depth to look into—sight becomes insight and the eye is satisfied. The book-object is a liaison, complete and autonomous, connected solely to the viewer to be experienced intimately and privately, encountered at will as a revelatory device through touch where my distant hands reach yours.

Because I make very small editions of complex bookworks, I have long made access an essential part of my studio practice, placing my work in public collections and for use in collegiate programs. I also offer access to these bookworks through the reading room adjoining my studio. As an educator having taught the book as artistic practice for decades, I've collected the work of many other artists, photographers and poets, produced primarily by small and independent presses or the artists themselves as a resource for my students. As a practitioner, my collection has offered me inspiration, affirmation and collegiality, each book representing a photographer, artist, poet or press I admire and I share those by appointment as well. 

The book continues to hold an important place in contemporary photographic practice by offering the photographer a physical site for extended possibilities for narrative and presentation in an intimate conversation with the viewer. To quote the poet Patti Smith, there is nothing more beautiful in our material world than the book. I believe this to be true and will continue making photo bookworks as long as my hands will let me.   —PMR

Please visit www.photobookworks.com to learn more about visiting No.3 Reading Room & Photo Book Works