Over twenty-four years, the primary focus of my work has been on self-portraiture. The flexibility of this genre has enabled me to comment not only on the unavoidable and constant changes that occur to our bodies and psyches, but also on similar changes in the world around us. Exploring elements that deeply affect us – memory, the passage of time, denial, connection and renewal – my self-portraits strive to be both universal and intensely personal.
I present my self-portraits in two ways: as singular expressions unto themselves; and in sequence with other images to create photographic narratives. Two such narratives are: my book LifeLines, which offers a symbolic journey through life’s inevitable cycles by juxtaposing self–portraits with images of transformation in Nature; and An Hour of the Wolf: Nightmare Quadrangle, in which self-portraiture, combined with still life and landscape, personalize and intensify the unsettling content of the narrative.
As long as I have taken self-portraits, I have worked in the historical process of platinum, a medium that enhances the timeless quality in each image while at the same time creating unprecedented elegance in tone and detail. Although platinum is my first choice in technique, in recent years I have explored producing selected self-portraits as iris prints, resulting in images larger in size than is possible through the platinum process.
