Before the earliest organisms developed the sense of sight, they first had to develop a point of view: a directionality. Not vision, but orientation. The capacity to locate the self in relation to a source, to know not merely that light exists but that it is actually coming from somewhere.

They couldn’t make out their surroundings, but they understood, or felt, or responded to a signal that could just barely be discerned.

They had a choice: turn towards the light, or don’t.

Over time, these creatures developed dents in their bodies to hold the eye once it arrived, even if that were twenty generations in the future.

Somewhere along the way of the ever-unfolding accident of evolution, structure anticipated function, and the socket came before the eye.

Alongside chance mutation and circumstantial pressure, I believe that there was something at play that operated like desire. Not conscious desire, or a will, but a yearning. A yearning oriented towards something beyond the threshold of perception. This yearning became a key condition of survival.

And now here we find ourselves, several billion years later.

Our vision has improved greatly.

Yet I can’t shake the feeling that there is something still out there, just beyond the limit of my perception. I can’t prove it, but I know it’s there. It’s something like an energy, or a signal. When I make photographs, I feel like I am nearly brushing against it, but it remains just a hair’s breadth out of reach. It’s there when I gaze into the eyes of my nephew and when I’m caught in the vortex of an embercast. It’s there as I look towards celestial bodies and when I stare down the barrel of a cop’s gun. My mother sleeping beneath a pile of blankets, the scar where my father’s breastbone was split to heal his heart.

The camera gathers what it can from these encounters.

The resulting photographs are not quite documents, and not quite figments. They’re neither purely figurative, nor do they cede to complete abstraction. They aren’t windows, they aren’t mirrors. They resist photography’s susceptibility to pin down, fix, and name the thing it’s looking at. They are cradled in the gray area between categories. This work was driven by the same yearning that sculpted the socket before the eye. Each piece is an anticipatory space, awaiting something that has not yet fully arrived.

Before the earliest organisms developed the sense of sight, they first had to develop a point of view: a directionality. Not vision, but orientation. The capacity to locate the self in relation to a source, to know not merely that light exists but that it is actually coming from somewhere.

They couldn’t make out their surroundings, but they understood, or felt, or responded to a signal that could just barely be discerned.

They had a choice: turn towards the light, or don’t.

Over time, these creatures developed dents in their bodies to hold the eye once it arrived, even if that were twenty generations in the future.

Somewhere along the way of the ever-unfolding accident of evolution, structure anticipated function, and the socket came before the eye.

Alongside chance mutation and circumstantial pressure, I believe that there was something at play that operated like desire. Not conscious desire, or a will, but a yearning. A yearning oriented towards something beyond the threshold of perception. This yearning became a key condition of survival.

And now here we find ourselves, several billion years later.

Our vision has improved greatly.

Yet I can’t shake the feeling that there is something still out there, just beyond the limit of my perception. I can’t prove it, but I know it’s there. It’s something like an energy, or a signal. When I make photographs, I feel like I am nearly brushing against it, but it remains just a hair’s breadth out of reach. It’s there when I gaze into the eyes of my nephew and when I’m caught in the vortex of an embercast. It’s there as I look towards celestial bodies and when I stare down the barrel of a cop’s gun. My mother sleeping beneath a pile of blankets, the scar where my father’s breastbone was split to heal his heart.

The camera gathers what it can from these encounters.

The resulting photographs are not quite documents, and not quite figments. They’re neither purely figurative, nor do they cede to complete abstraction. They aren’t windows, they aren’t mirrors. They resist photography’s susceptibility to pin down, fix, and name the thing it’s looking at. They are cradled in the gray area between categories. This work was driven by the same yearning that sculpted the socket before the eye. Each piece is an anticipatory space, awaiting something that has not yet fully arrived.