I look out through a friend's kitchen window at his back yard in Somerville, where the carriage house is visible through spring snow. My friend's ex-lover has lived there, for ten years, just across the flower garden. He is moving out this week. What has it been like, I wonder, to wash dishes for ten years looking at Jonathan’s windows? And what different sort of loss is it now as Jonathan leaves in this new and more decisive way? I can’t properly frame the question to my friend at the time; instead I make a photo. 

The more intractable dilemma is the question of why, beyond empathy for my friend, this view is so important and alive to me. These images come from problems or puzzles; they become a way of wrestling with questions, or even posing questions that I can’t quite frame in any way other than with a photograph. I come from a family that is all about words. In my childhood the cookbooks were mixed on the kitchen shelf with dictionaries, an encyclopedia, and an atlas so we wouldn’t have to run to the living room to settle one of our routine dinner table arguments. If my upbringing was intensely verbal and figurative then my academic training, in physics, was intensely quantitative and formal. But there are questions and ideas that don’t yield well either to words or numbers. And that’s why I make photographs. I make them as meditations, particularly on questions about people I am close to. Each image in this body of work has within it a story in which truths
intertwine with questions, questions that might collapse under their own weight if asked outright. So the photo can be a way of talking around a question, circling it, stalking it, being patient with it, maybe not looking it full in the face until much later. The passage of time is important for these images; they function as the scaffolding for long-term inquiry and reflection. Time's flow is also encompassed within each multi-panel composite, assembled from separate moments and perspectives. Intimacy develops in a similar way, from the accretion of single instants and interactions over time.

The portfolio is printed in nineteenth-century handmade processes, kallitype and platinum/palladium. I print this way because I see a symmetry between the experience of the viewer and the maker of such prints. The making process, the reification of image, is painstaking
and intimate and requires an ongoing relationship with the physical materials: raw paper and sensitizing chemistry. The small contact prints and delicate tonal scale are similarly demanding of a viewer; engaging this material requires an investment of time and attention.
Suppose you stuck a branch upright in the earth and then every day, at the exact same time of day, you checked the shadow it cast and marked the ground at the shadow's tip. If you did this for a full year the marks would trace out an elongated and asymmetrical figure
eight. This figure is called an analemma. Its shape reflects the seasonal changes in the earth’s relationship to the sun: we slowly approach or gently pull away, we tilt our axis to one side or the other. At times during this project I have traveled across the country to
photograph in the house of a friend, sometimes one I haven’t seen for years. We circle back, passing one another, maybe closer than the last time, maybe not. The slow paths we trace out with respect to each other are mediated by our histories and the pull of the other people in our lives. Ultimately these photographs aim to investigate and document the gentle variations in those paths.