I have been photographing everyday structures for many years: walls, parking garages, skyscrapers, stairwells, streets, sidewalks and warehouses.  They are, for the most part, not visually appealing objects. In fact, they are probably invisible to most people who use them on a regular basis. My interest is not in documenting these structures but in extracting certain elements from them to create photographs that describe shapes and forms, patterns, geometry and color.  I began with photographs of walls. At first, these were straightforward pictures in which the walls can be clearly identified. Over time, I expanded the concept to build more abstract renditions of the walls, reducing them to essentially color field studies. 

I began “Street” as a variant on the photographic genre commonly known as "Street Photography".  In this case, my photographs  document the streets and sidewalks themselves rather than the people crossing them. This concept evolved from the observation that while we constantly use streets, sidewalks and parking lots in order to get around, we rarely look at what we’re walking on. In our hurry to get to and from our everyday destinations, we tune out the peculiar patterns and shapes that exist on these surfaces. Many of these markings are symbols designed to move and place us efficiently and safely. Some are the result of repair work or construction. Still others are simply the scars and erosion caused by the millions of feet and vehicles that pass over them every day.

Working with the walls eventually led to my photographing parking garages, office buildings and warehouses in different cities across the country. Here, I opted to create composite grids for each type of structure. Up close, you can see each parking garage or warehouse but, seen from a distance, the grids appear as a series of patterns.

The stairwell images became a logical extension of the Urban Grids. Here, I took advantage of the repetitive and monotonous nature of each stairwell to produce patterned composites. Although every stairwell that I rendered was almost identical, no two resulting images are alike.  All of the stairwells were photographed in the resort town of Ocean City, MD.

“Museums” is a project in which I turned the concept of a museum around on itself by creating a work of art representing each institution using only its basic infrastructural elements. I photographed ceiling lights, hand rails, display cabinets, air conditioning ducts, auditorium seats – the more mundane the better. In keeping with my other projects about urban structures, I was primarily focused on photographing things that are in plain sight but most likely invisible to the people who use or walk past them. Visitors to museums are there to look at master works of art, not the floorboards or track lights. I set certain rules for executing this project. I didn’t photograph any of the art nor did I appropriate iconic architecture. No two museums were rendered in the same way. After taking hundreds, sometimes thousands, of photographs, I would return to my studio and build very complex grids using all of the individual photographs to create a virtual deconstruction of each museum. All of the individual images in the composites are straight photographs.