Here’s a recently reworked piece, Calla Lily Displacement, from the Destructive Testing photo series I started ten years ago:

Believe it or not this work sprang from a discomfort I had with the documentary photo tradition, where the photographer is often considered an invisible presence, and where photography is a neutral and even benign tool with which to view of the world.

Destructive Testing is a group of still life images documenting various gently destructive acts against botanical material. In these actions, I was interested in questioning that neutrality by pointing out the presence of the photographer. At the same time I wanted the image to still be a beautiful one, something that balanced the destructiveness with qualities we expect from images we want to have around us.

(And yes, I wanted to do a calla lily picture that wasn’t like the tens of thousands of them that have already been done…)