As consumers our lives are full of stuff.   Some of it is tied to the necessities of feeding and clothing ourselves, but most of it is part of a system based on want, desire and gratification.  There is an advertising mechanism in place that tells us what to buy and how to feel about it, but what interests me are products that represent a break down in this system.   These are objects of such poor quality and small intrinsic worth that they lack material value and emotional appeal, not because they are physically lacking in desirable qualities but because they are ignored by the cultural machine that would assign them value.   These are small things that do not impose much on our lives so we do not expect them to function well or to steal our attention.  These are easier to replace than to store so we now consume them in a cyclical fashion like food, but rarely do we enjoy them that way.
      I find these things in superstores like Wal-Mart or Target and dollar stores where they, by their placement and lack of advertising, appear to be shelf filler.   They are cheap products simply for the sake of being cheap.   My images cast these objects in new light and show them for their uniqueness and surface quality derived directly from their production.
      I use a variety of photographic means to make images but none has been more impactful to me than the flatbed scanner.  Having not been designed to render three dimensional forms the flatbed scanner brings to the image a host of small glares, distortions and fall off of light, yet it is the ultimate tool in descriptive ability.   It brings out the unseen detail and tonal variety that often defies the appearance of these objects as cheap.
      Dollar store die-cast toy cars come eight for a dollar.   They have minimal packing, no name recognition and very little relationship to real cars.  They would undoubtedly have no more staying power with a child than a single potato chip.  They have a limited number of decorations to share, whose placement is always off, their paint is uneven and gloppy around the edges and their parts never seem fit.  The poor construction of these objects seems almost willful as though it was planned in some way to drive the price down.   The cars are so ridden with flaws that each one takes on a distinct individuality and beauty; no two cars could ever have the same errors making these special in way that a better toy car or even a real car could never be.
      Small plastic bottles are the ultimate in planned obsolescence.   They usually hold three or four ounces making them safe for airline travel and incredibly cheap.   These bottles would no doubt be used once then thrown away where they could survive indefinitely in landfills, but they are also examples of very fine production and design with soft forms and pleasing shapes worthy of appreciation.
      As information has become increasingly a commodity of excess in our society it has pushed to the periphery certain types of traditional media.    To this end I examine black and white news paper images which appear to have no great value to the story they illustrate except as filler.   They are like my bottles and cars in that they belong to tradition of representation, but now relate to that only incidentally.  I attempt to give these images a new tradition lifting the pictures with silly putty and creating a new visual experience.
      In all my pictures I attempt to flesh out the character of objects which go totally overlooked by most people, by using the objects’ inherent formal qualities to make photographic images which are grand and mysterious in all the ways these objects are not.