"Diptychs" represents a photographic investigation into the processes underlying the aestheticization of visual experience. The project adopts the Rhode Island forest as a cipher, which is to say it treats the forest as a visual problem--but one with a potential solution. This presumption entails a degree of faith on the part of the photographer and viewer; we have to, after all, believe in the existence of a solution in order to satisfy ourselves that the search for it might in some sense be justified. "Diptychs" examines the nature of this belief and its consequences for aesthetics and photographic representation.

The images comprising "Diptychs" were shot on location in Cranston and Warwick, Rhode Island--specifically in the environs of the Pawtuxet River near Narragansett Bay. The land in this area is low-lying and wet and fosters a large degree of vegetal (over)growth. This results in an incredible level of visual complexity verging on impenetrability. Shooting was conducted over several months during the late summer and fall of this year and occurred at locations deep within, barely within, and entirely outside of the forest. The images do not themselves, however, disclose this latter element of methodological variability. Instead, they each purport to depict a location within the boundaries of the forest.

The images were captured on the lowest-speed film emulsion still in mass-production. Since the film is so "slow," it exhibits a very high degree of resolving power. Exposures were, moreover, generally conducted with minimal apertures--which allows for a practically infinite depth of field and likewise necessitates long exposure times, sometimes on the order of several minutes, even in daylight. So the extreme sharpness of the images occurs alongside blurred indicators of motion in time. Additionally, the film is sensitized differently than "modern" black-and-white emulsions (i.e., orthopanchromatically) which causes green elements such as foliage to be rendered differently--in particular, lighter--than they might be by a more "faithful" emulsion. The images were printed so as to emphasize this atypical tonality.

Present in the work, then, is an interplay between elements and methodologies that tend towards realism and those which tend towards abstraction and/or deception. This paradigm extends in other directions. The image-pairings, for instance, are chosen with primary regard to formal coherence. However, formal coherence necessarily suggests spatial and/or temporal continuity. In some cases, this is exactly "correct" in that it reflects placements of the imaged elements which in fact hold in reality or on the contact sheet. In other cases, the pair-members are selected from entirely different settings or rolls. And in still other cases, the relationship of the images with respect to each other exists but is inverted by the pairing.