Contact Sheets

Contact Sheets was one of the first photos I took in my Stacks series. The photographs from Stacks catalogue documents that surround me: books, papers, magazines, journals, sketchpads and photographs. Each stack represents something different—a passage of time, a collection, a history. In Contact Sheets, I have stacked hundreds of photographic contact sheets that I have created over the past 10 years. The result is a series of lines, each representing a print that I have made, a sedimentary record of creative growth. As a general theme, I am interested in patterns of growth and have always found it natural to look at things from a close perspective. By cropping my subjects closely, I am not only becoming intimate with them, I am also abstracting them. With this treatment, familiar subjects become unrecognizable and require new investigation. The shape-shifting ambiguity made possible by the photographic lens resonates with my general sense of the world unseen by the naked eye, a worl