All of my Black and White pictures are first exposed on film and then hand printed in the darkroom on silver based photographic paper. I choose this tradition as an artistic expression, as a way to be intimately involved in a tactile image-making medium, and to continually inspire and inform my teaching.

 

In a word Black and White photography is about LIGHT - what it reveals and what it ignores; how it strikes or envelopes. The Black and White tradition releases the depiction from Color's verisimilitude. It foregrounds the Elements and Principles of Design and takes the viewer out of the everyday and banal. It forces the viewer to contemplate the relationships of texture, patterns, shapes, and contrasts of scale and distance.

 

The name Illuminated Deliberations refers not only to the celebration of Light as a subject, but also to the thought process involved in mentally designing the picture, previsuallizing the image without hue, and, in most cases, the contemplative procedure of erecting a 4" x 5" view camera with which many of these images were made.