Via

While walking, we see and are seen, we engage ourselves with our neighborhoods, pause to notice bits of the world we may otherwise not, and we experience the world at the human pace. The intertwined physical, mental, and social activity is deceptively easy and multi-layered in richness.

These images are made during rare and distant opportunities to immerse myself in the minutia of my surroundings, to see and be seen, and to navigate the world at a more appreciative pace. I photograph in Italian and Spanish historic town centers where walking is the primary mode of transportation and daily visual experience and expression is everywhere emphasized.

I try to use the heightened sensory awareness that walking can give to discover new visual combinations of human behaviors in context of their surroundings. Ironically, the heightened sensory experience we often seek rarely appears to occur within the photographs. Instead, the images are exaggerated moments of disconnect and distraction. The photographs bend fragments from reality into lapses from reality, studies in mindless movements through common spaces, gaps in self-awareness, and heads full of elsewhere thoughts. Instead of the dizzying and overwhelming sensations of the Stendhal syndrome in places where beauty and history collide, we appear to remain in our own troubled heads, rarely fully responding to what is near.

All prints are archival pigment prints on 17×22 paper.