Package Collages
This is a small selection of the packages that I've been decorating and mailing several times a year since the mid-90s. Back then, I shot about a roll of film on my 35 millimeter camera each week: of gatherings with friends, concerts, street life, landscapes, and pretty much anything I came in contact with. Images couldn't be deleted in-camera as we do now with digital cameras and phones, so when I would pick up my developed pictures from the camera store, I would cull out the shots that weren't good enough to go in my photo albums. It was largely due to trying to find a purpose for this detritus that my hobby of making collages on packages for friends was born. (That, and trying to impress an out-of-state girlfriend). Soon I was collecting images from magazines, flyers for shows, political stickers, and so on, to best form pleasing parallels and juxtapositions for future projects.
I enjoy the challenge of integrating into an unexpected aesthetic "flow" disparate bits and bobs from both my recent life and my distant past, the world I photograph and the world as depicted by a wide variety of media, visual "textures" and clear-cut images, and other uneasy polar opposites. Through carefully dovetailing together so much that wouldn't meet otherwise, I achieve a kind of meaning that can't be captured by words, a calligraphy made just of the eye's sinuous gaze.