ARTIST'S STATEMENT
Photography Degree Zero

The title of my project, Photography Degree Zero, is a direct reference to Roland Barthes' book Writing Degree Zero, published in French in 1953 and in English in 1968, with an introduction by Susan Sontag. Barthes offers theoretical meditations on writing, focusing particularly on the dispassionate tone and minimalist style of the French new novel. In related fashion, my work is meant to represent a departure from the picture sign idea of the photograph, as well as from the historical and cultural expectations surrounding the idea that a photograph will describe, document, and narrate (as in the snapshot, landscape photography, portraiture, and photojournalism).

I approach photography as picture making rather than picture taking. I am interested, both visually and conceptually, in chaos theory, fractal geometry, and symmetry and asymmetry as found not only in art, but nature, science, architecture and mathematics (the golden mean, the logarithmic spiral). Order and chance both play key roles in the creation of my work, which has affinities to Abstract Expressionism (size, scale, and Òoff-frame space), Surrealism (light, the darkroom, photograms), and Minimalism (material-as-process, seriality, non-representational images, issues of silence). One question frequently asked about my work is How was this picture made? More recently, this has been joined by the question What is this a picture of? With these two questions my art not only confronts photography-as-process )the Polaroid camera is both invention and a process) but also challenges the prescribed expectation that photographs depict reality.

Abstraction is well-established in painting, but still emergent in photography, as is suggested by the Abstract Urge and Content and Discontent exhibitions, both curated by photography critic Andy Grunberg and both including my work. In my particular case, abstraction has in the last few years approached more and more closely towards Minimalism, as my most recent one-person show in New York bears out. The reason is that I wish to push the parameters of the photographic medium, both to ques.tion the process by which a pho.to.graph is made and raise the issue of photographic meaning in the absence from the frame of a recognizable representation.

Abstraction in photography is a virtual contradiction in terms, and Minimalism a further oxymoron. It is at the particular intersection where a photograph is devoid of any recognizable image that I wish to concentrate my artistic, intellectual and aesthetic energies. At the present juncture in my professional and creative life, a fellowship would provide me with the necessary time and the appropriate professional support to further develop the underpinning kinship between art and science which is already a strong presence in my work. Areas that I need in particular to further investigate are physics, especially as it pertains to light and color; the proportional harmonies that are found both in the natural sciences and in architecture; and the meditations on life's complexities that are found in theology, especially in the religious teachings of Tibet.

]Minimalism remains distinctly underdeveloped in photography, but is well established in contemporary painting and sculpture, with specific affinities between my work and the sculpture of Dan Flavin (color and light), the paintings of Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin (simplicity and repetition), the conceptual art of Sol LeWitt (geometry and systems), and the sculptural installations of the late Donald Judd (non-art materials and the square). The work of all these artists has a sublime presence and a timeless eloquence that not only challenges ideas about what is and what is not art, but also carries with it spiritual and perceptual overtones that are existentially self-defining. In my own work, this same combination of qualities can be seen in a palette linked with the stained-glass window of my Catholic upbringing which serves as the basis for a rigorous investigation of light, that primary agent responsible for all photography.

I view myself as a late 20th century artist, using the tools of her time for personal expression. More often than not, the tool in question is the large format Polaroid 20 X 24 camera. This camera, of which there are only five in the world, was built approximately twenty years ago under the sponsorship of the Polaroid Corporation. Ideas and visual codes that I have used freely in my art practices derive from the discoveries of Benoit Mandelbrot, who developed fractal geometry. I have also used in my own work ideas found in the writings of Rudolf Arnheim, whose basic thesis that art has two structures (the circle and the square) can be seen in connection with my use of the photographic apparatus with its circular lens and rectangular camera body. These conceptual and contextual affinities have both given me the tools to create in a more meaningful way and have underwritten a richer synoptic clarity in the end result.

As our culture spins towards the 21st century, camera-based and technological media like photography seem logical and appealing choices for certain artists. Photography's protean diversity, its comparatively short history, its technical advances, and the universality of its images all speak to the interests of those artists in addressing issues beyond and outside the rarefied concerns of the art world of former times. It is in this spirit that I have made a conscious decision to work in a medium in which a machine can combine with imagination to redefine notions of truth and beauty at 1/125th of a second.