Artist Statement

Roadside Artifacts along Old Route 66 is a new image series I began in the last year. These images grew out of an on-going project to document the present-day reality of Route 66 with a pinhole camera. For several years, I have been using a digital camera to record potential sites and then document the process of making pinhole photographs on large format film.

Several of the images I made during the summer of 2006 with the digital camera captured situations that were so transitory that I was not able to make a pinhole image of the site at that time. Many of these images had particularly strong dynamics of light and environment that I felt could best be communicated with a selectively manipulated print. These manipulated images are intended to provide a different subjective interpretation of these sites that will hopefully serve as a useful contrast to the pinhole camera series.

Technical Statement
The images in this series were captured with a Canon Digital XT camera at maximum resolution, then cropped to 4 x 5 format at 4500 x 3600 pixel resolution and selectively manipulated using multiple masks, image filters, and color adjustments. In most cases, several different manipulation strategies were applied to copies of each image, and the best solution was chosen for the series portfolio. The images were then printed with an Epson Stylus Pro 3800 on Arches Infinity Textured archival paper.