What are “Stages”?
The images on this website tagged “Stages” are the most recent in a personal project that I’ve chased ever since I first picked up a camera to make “art” in 1989. I was a foreign exchange student at Sunderland Polytechnic in Sunderland England. I was studying painting and was forced by the curriculum to try photography and printmaking. Over winter break I traveled to the continent and I came back to England with several rolls of shot film. As I reviewed the images I started to see repeated themes. I saw poignant urban landscapes; sometimes empty, sometimes activated by a figure or two. There were repeating elements; stairs suggesting ascension, doors suggesting choices, and topiary and chairs standing in for people. Sure, these are the things everyone sees when they travel in European cities; but there was something else here that I have been chasing ever since. To me these were stages for human dramas pregnant with clues about events that have just happened or are about to. In the built environment I sense narratives just out of reach, just out of reason. These places are my Stages. These are the images most relentlessly important to me and they are probably as close as I can get to an accurate self-portrait.
