Orbiter · Statement
To photograph is, often, to choose to make something insignificant meaningful. Significance can be found in the everyday: in the beauty of off-season bleachers that seem to have emerged from freshly fallen snow, or in an old amusement park ride called Orbiter, which I found one morning at a fair in Vermont, have photographed three times in three years, and named this series after.
My camera allows me to become an "orbiter," letting me examine my environment while remaining slightly removed and distanced from it. For this series, I followed the theme of orbiting: something or someone that searches, observes, and probes. My photographs aren't empty, but there's a kind of emptiness in the lots, fields, and structures to which I'm drawn: an absence of people, but a clear sense of those who were once there. I tend to make images about the places around me, wandering with my camera in the fairly specific landscapes of New Hampshire, Vermont, and Upstate New York. My desire and anxiety to create keeps me searching within these environments, hoping for new subjects left behind by others that, with my camera, I can bring significance to.