Photography is a peculiar blend of art and science, using a machine of marvelous sophistication to satisfy what is an essentially simple want: to show to someone else something you have seen.  That want encompasses a huge swath of human endeavor, from science that plumbs the heights and depths of cosmic scale, to family histories both great and small, and perhaps most of all, some innate desire to say “I was here, see?  It happened.”

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              A small beacon in a vast darkness.

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              My grandmother took this banana plant from Hawai‘i to the mainland in the early 1970s when the Navy restationed my grandfather.  For decades, it grew in soil far from its home, reproducing on its own.  My grandmother would let it grow into a stand of trees every year, then cut them down for the winter.  She moved the trees to new homes in other states and they would grow and die and grow again.  A few years ago, unprompted, she sent me a box containing a root bundle and no instructions.  When I asked her what to do with the root, she replied only that “Nana has spunk.”  There are other banana trees in our yard, this one is the one that I can trace some part of a lineage, and how it is tied up with my own, how I have also been transplanted to many places.

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It is here now.  It was once elsewhere.  See?  It happened.

Anna Atkins was the first person to publish a book of photography, in 1843.  In line with her being a botanist, hers were cyanotype photograms of plants.  Photograms are beautiful objects, unique one-offs that cannot truly be reproduced.  They render translucent objects beautifully and, being a negative process, abstract an object to its essential form.  Here, I use digital photographic processes to present an object with the aesthetic of an analog photogram, a sort of bridging of past and present.  In turn, I contemplate my own past and future. 

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I send out a beacon.