Artist Statement

My approach to photography brings together a passion for making images with a zeal for educating others about the natural beauty and biology of the Florida landscape. For me, this enables the process of education to escape the pages of a textbook or reference work, and take on a life that engages learners and viewers at an emotional level. In particular, I focus on the plants and plant communities that comprise the landscape. Learning is an act of exploration, and my goal is to share the exhilaration of discovered beauty with others.

I take inspiration first from the natural beauty of the botanical landscape, as well as from literature. I am not alone in this interest, but attempt to stand on the shoulders of others who have gone before. Botanist explorers in Florida who I have admired and enjoyed reading include William Bartram and David Fairchild – themselves employing drawings or photography in addition to the written word to enhance understanding of plants and botanical landscapes. Bartram affirmed the motivation which drove him, upon meeting another traveler on his journeys with very different purposes, reasserting it's urging as a touchstone in his own life when he said, "I am continually impelled by a restless spirit of curiosity in pursuit of new productions of nature, my chief happiness consists in tracing and admiring the infinite power, majesty, and perfection of the great almighty Creator, and in the contemplation, that through divine aid and permission, I might be instrumental in discovering, and introducing into my native country, some original productions of nature, which might become useful to society."

Another passage, this one from the introduction of the book on Bartram’s Travels (published in 1790), that also resonates with me as an artist and a naturalist is reproduced below:

"This world, as a glorious apartment of the boundless palace of the sovereign Creator, is furnished with an infinite variety of animated scenes, inexpressibly beautiful and pleasing, equally free to the inspection and enjoyment of all his creatures. Perhaps there is not any part of creation, within the reach of our observations, which exhibits a more glorious display of the Almighty hand, than the vegetable world. Such a variety of pleasing scenes, ever changing, throughout the seasons, arising from various causes and assigned each to the purpose and use determined."

Image Manipulation


Each image presented on this website and available for sale as a print is a direct product of manipulation. While it is often my intent to represent colors, tones and spatial relationships as I experienced them through the lens, I reserve the right to depart from reality in order to create what I feel is the most effective expression in an image. Examples of these alterations include, but are not limited to: cropping, adjustments to tonality, hue, saturation, texture, correction of optical aberrations, and combining of separate images. One manipulation which I do not practice, either singly or in collage, is presenting an image that has been flipped horizontally from its correct orientation. Plants often, like the faces of people, have a chirality that gives them a distinct (or even diagnostic) appearance. Because the identities of plants in my botanical landscapes are important, I will not knowingly misrepresent them in this way, since I do not wish to obscure their correct recognition to the trained eye. Any departure from this policy would be documented forthrightly.