Erasure

An ongoing body of work.

I make these photographs in the woods and small towns of northern Wisconsin, working in snow, fog, and full night, conditions that take much of the world around a subject away.

In daylight, snow and fog do that work. They remove distance and scale, separating subjects from much of the world around them. At night, I bring a flashlight into the dark and recover only part of a scene, while everything else remains in the night.

The subjects are ordinary things: an empty structure, a clothesline, a road sign, a chair in the woods, a pole in the fog. Some have been left behind; others are simply isolated.

I started this work drawn to disappearance and loss, and I still am. Yet the less I leave in the frame, the more visible the subject becomes.

I’m interested in what happens when there is enough information to recognize something, but not enough to fully resolve it. Scale can shift, familiar objects can become strange, and what isn’t shown becomes something the viewer has to imagine. I’d rather leave a scene partially revealed than fully explained.

Northern Wisconsin is key to my work. Its winters, darkness, woods, and weather provide both the subjects and the conditions in which I photograph.