Ideas Without End

Invitation is a word I've always liked. It sounds good, and often it can feel good too.

This summer I was invited to join a group photography show at 5ive and 40rty, a gallery on Trade Street in Winston-Salem. Well, the show - Surreal Expression - is up now and will remain so until August 8th (give or take). Kim Varnadoe, Cameron Dennis, and Marlya Voynova are also featured in the show - a quartet as tight as the Supremes.

I'm a little carried away. It's true. Why hide it?

In 2010 America, no one hides anything, so why not just let it rip a little.

This image, Ideas Without End, was made with milkweed, a dark velvet curtain, and a willing and beautiful model, my daughter Marissa. This is a special photograph to me - an example of when I began orchestrating portraits more than simply making them. I used props and sets, a model and an assistant to spill milkweeds from above the frame. It felt like a lot of stuff, a lot of moving parts.

As a writer who began photographing after two decades of working with words on a page, composition meant story. Composition meant narrative. It contained something a little deeper than three dimensional space. Writing contains an element that allows composition to enter the fourth dimension, the dimension called time.

I am trying to conjure a whiff of that element in my photographic compositions.

If you can, check out the show at 5ive & 40rty. 541 Trade Street in sunny Winston-Salem.