Given how little space there was on top of the hoodoo, I was quite surprised by how easy it was for Hannah and Krista to find a very successful pose. We tried a couple, the first with one model leaning back, and the other reclining, and then this one, with the two bodies interwoven through Krista’s arm on Hannah’s shoulder.

Without a doubt the most haunting element of the Maine forts were their spiral stairways, unique in the United States. For this image, I pre-focused the camera on the middle of the stairway, and then placed it on its back, on the stairway - this was the only way to include so much of it in the image.

This image was made several months after the second (!) attempt to demolish the Sydney Steel Coke Oven - apparently it just didn’t want to be destroyed. I found an incredible beauty to the dying building - an elegance in its decay and demise.

Towards the end of the session, I asked Alexandra and Liam to simply stand against the wall and embrace; as with the first session, the result was stunning. The flow of lines between their two bodies, combined with the placement of their hands builds the image into a veritable study of intimacy.

While I was drawn to the flowers as subjects in themselves, much of what I did with them was formal in nature, relying on composition and framing to build images that engaged my eye. The subject could just as well have been broken pottery or clouds.

This image was made though eyes which had been opened to a different way of seeing by the poetry of Joy Yourcenar - it is amazing how words can change how you see the world around you.

It is always a high compliment when a model responds strongly to an image, and when I first showed this to Brianna, she immediately was positive, eventually declaring that it would be the first piece she would frame and put on a wall!

A classic infrared image, with the sky a dramatic contrast to the light foliage below.

I just stare at this image in wonder. The majesty and power present in such a simple object, a cloud, is breathtaking.

As soon as I saw the repeating lines in the worn rock, I knew this space had the potential for a very striking composition. Monique and I worked for perhaps twenty minutes with the digital camera, exploring the possibilities before we hit upon this composition. I immediately asked if the pose could be held long enough to make it with the view camera, and after receiving a yes, I began setting up the larger camera.

Colour photography has been a long, slow road for me, with digital photography finally facilitating my explorations of the medium. This image was one of the first I recall thinking about colour when I made it - the beautiful tones of the field through the window contrasting with the subtle gray of the building itself.

The contrast between the burned out side of the window, and the untouched, hand-painted side, is striking. This was the only piece of stained glass still visible in the church when I arrived to photograph it; all the other windows had been boarded up in expectation of the coming winter.

There is no way to describe how an image like this happens - it is like a gift from the world to me. I was asked by another photographer how many images like this I have…I pause and said perhaps six. After more then a decade of image making, I am surprised they have happened so often.

I don’t do a lot of straight portraiture, but this image was such a perfect image of Staci that it had to be made.

There seem to be two kinds of architectural images for me - overviews and details; each has it’s own aesthetic, each with it’s own pleasure. The simple act of pointing a camera at a beautiful object, no matter how simple, has become a pleasure for me.

A marriage of the 1850 gun emplacement, and the retrofitted twentieth century addition above the original fort, the multiple flat planes of this image really please me - the receding windows within windows, and the small detail on the curve of the bottom step just make my toes curl. It was a wonderful end to two intense days of visual exploration.

One of the first involved projects I completed photographically was an exploration of an Oil Refinery, as an aesthetic space. This image of the stacks and pipes back-lit against the evening sky was one of the more abstract of the project.

The roots of this image stretch back to 1992, when I was experimenting with printing multiple images within the same frame; when I started working with digital imaging, it seemed an easier way to do the same thing - combine my modern images of the forts, with their historical plans.

The first colour water nude I was ever pleased with was made in 1998, more by the happenstance of having colour film in my 35mm camera than by design. With this image, Ingrid‘s pose worked perfectly with the flow of the water, so as soon as I’d made it in black and white, I set aside the view camera and made a stitched image with the digital camera for the highest possible resolution.

The power of a portrait is not always about the gaze, sometimes it is about the averted gaze, and the mystery it holds.