I didn’t start out making abstract photos, my first one was a mistake.

While traveling in Thailand, I was capturing a photo of a river landscape while on a boat, which failed according to nearly every rule I had learned. The camera moved during the exposure and the scene began to dissolve. Instead of recording the landscape clearly, the photograph transformed it.

I should have deleted it. Instead, I kept looking at it.

There was something in the image that felt closer to the experience of being there than a technically correct photo might have been. It was no longer simply a picture of a place. Light, movement, color, time and the camera had changed it. It became something I had not fully seen with my own eyes. That mistake became a question.

I began experimenting deliberately with long exposures and in-camera movement, trying to understand what had happened in that first mistake. The experiments became less about recreating an effect and more about the relationship between what was physically in front of me, what I perceived, what I remembered, and what the camera captured.

The image came first. The question revealed itself through making more photographs. Those early experiments eventually developed into Memories.

I began combining individual abstract exposures digitally, first from Thailand and later from San Francisco. The collages allowed different moments to exist together. Images overlapped, fragmented and merged into larger compositions that reflected the way I was beginning to think about memory itself. Not as a stable picture, but as pieces of experience that shift, flow, disappear and return. Memories became the final form for that investigation, but finishing the collages left more questions unanswered.

The work could reconstruct an experience after it became a memory, but I was becoming more interested in what happened before the experience became one. I wanted to remain closer to the original moment, to that brief instance when perception, emotion and recognition are still happening at the same time. That brought me back to the single exposure.

Beginning in 2021, I started approaching photography differently. I was no longer trying to build an image from fragments after the experience. I wanted the transformation to happen at the moment the photograph was made.

I began walking through landscapes without knowing exactly what I was searching for. Sometimes I’d travel for miles without making a single photo. I wait until something changes. Light across water, movement in landscape, an opening between trees, fog, color, distance, atmosphere. When the moment arrives, the decision often arrives with it.

Movement. Stillness. Duration. Gesture. The technique is no longer something I apply to the photograph afterward. It has become a response to what I am experiencing in front of me. That shift became UNSEEN. The work still carries the questions that began with that accidental photo in Thailand, but I am no longer trying to recreate memory after the fact.

I am trying to stay inside the moment while it is still becoming one.