This work began years ago in reverence toward books and their ability to transcend one’s “reality” into another’s understanding of the world. The intimacy of reading a book, holding it in your hands and turning the pages is a physically unique experience and very different from reading a computer monitor. I began photographing books as objects and using text as texture or pattern. The idea became further distilled by juxtaposing my photographs of personally symbolic subjects with related text from vintage book pages. Often these books were “rescued” from dumpsters, yard sales and similar fates and I recycled them by using them in my artwork as printing surfaces. Specific pages are selected for their content, age and paper quality.

I see the relationship of viewing this work similar to browsing a library or bookstore shelf. In these images I combine the old with the new, the personal with the broader human condition. I examine where people and the natural world connect and disconnect, dwindling farm life; death and frailty and domestic, industrial and agricultural manual labor.