Artist Statement

A judge is required to be neutral and impartial; a person whose observations and decisions must be made in a detached, thoughtful, and measured manner. When I retired from the judiciary, I embraced the chance to express my own thoughts and feelings. I make pictures that reflect my internal response to what is happening in my life—the challenges of age, the birth and growth of my grandchildren, and my wife’s decline and passage from early onset Alzheimer’s. My photographs are an attempt to hold what cannot be held, time and memory.

I use light and shadow to map an emotional space of unquiet stillness. Ordinary moments are imbued with a sense of mystery, intimacy, longing and loss. Wallace Stevens referred to this space as an “immediate whole,” a phrase I have borrowed for the title of this work. The feelings within this space are not easily labeled. Indeed, to name them is to put them away, allowing them to dissipate. They are simply to be experienced.

Excerpt from Description Without Place by Wallace Stevens.

Dazzle yields to a clarity and we observe,

And observing is completing and we are content,
In a world that shrinks to an immediate whole,

Without secret arrangements of it in the mind.