My photography — architectural
vistas and details, cinematic and erotic self-portraiture, and beyond —
continues an exploration I began as a literary-historical scholar: an
exploration of the relationship between the physical structures we build, the
culture we weave, and the selves we construct within the physical and cultural
spaces through which we move. At times this exploration takes on the cloak of
the documentary; at others it masks itself in the entirely fictive but still
recognizably photographic, seeking the fictive construct within the real. In
locating and tracing the shape of moments of sublimity, both large-scale and
intimate, intended and unintended, I seek to illuminate the equivalent
possibilities of the conscious construction of self — of a personal sublime —
and of an erotics of the built world. Or at least to make you look up.
I
currently shoot primarily digital images but retain a nostalgia for film and the
smells of the darkroom. Although I respect and strive for the skill of control
that can capture a final desired image at the shutter's click, I learned in that
darkroom that light is not the only material for photography: there is the
camera itself, and the initial image created in capturing that light is also
material for transformation. Today I exercise that understanding in digital
form, carefully choosing when I will let the process show and when I
won't.
Now a Toronto-based
freelance book editor/proofreader and publishing educator with a PhD-induced
penchant for theory, I overcame a childhood aversion to cameras when I
borrowed a mostly manual Pentax for a holiday in the irresistably photogenic
New Orleans. Three children and a career change later, I returned to
photography and haven't looked back — except to see what's hidden in those
past shadows that I could not see there before.
· BA, English/theatre arts,
University of Waterloo · MA, English literature, University of Toronto
· PhD, English literature (eighteenth-century studies), University of
Toronto · coursework in publishing, Ryerson University · coursework
and workshops in photography: Toronto Board of Education; Sheridan College;
Toronto Image Works
