Artist's Statement

Rochester’s Mount Hope Cemetery is one of the most remarkable Victorian cemeteries in the United States. It sits on about two hundred acres of glaciated land adjacent to the University of Rochester, and has long been a favorite venue of mine for running and walking and thinking and not thinking.

A couple of decades ago, I was strolling through Mount Hope with a close friend and professional colleague. We were on a lunch break from our labors at that time as software engineers for the university’s Computing Center. The afternoon was overcast, chilly, threatening rain, and raw in the purest sense of a western New York autumn afternoon. We had our cameras in hand, as this was our Friday habit—to consult the city’s largest and most famous final resting place for the serendipitous tableau that we might capture and steal away into the darkroom. The day was verily, depressingly uncooperative.

At length, my companion stopped, removed her hat, and turned her face skyward, yearning for a few cool drops to wash away the frustration. “You know, Brian, I think a poor photographer would find little to photograph today. A mediocre photographer would probably find a few things to shoot, here and there, despite the conditions. But a great photographer? A great photographer would find absolutely nothing at all.” We had a good laugh, and an even better excuse to retreat to the warmth of the campus.

That moment planted a seed that has taken root to inform my work ever since. Is it true, or its false, that beauty is everywhere, always, in any and all circumstances—there to be seen and experienced, and possibly even captured—if only we have the eye and the attention to see it? This is the central question that informs my work, and in a larger sense, my entire life. I am increasingly convinced of the truth of it.

I am quite certain that the cemetery ghosts know the answer already, and my hope is that you will discover it for yourself as well—if not here, among these images, then elsewhere, out in the wider world, with your own interests and attention. If true, it is very good news indeed.

Biography

"I want to be an astronaut.”

“Can we climb the Matterhorn today? Okay, how about tomorrow?”

Well, sure. The truth is, this kind of thing only seems enormous to the adults. For kids, it’s just ordinary. Put one foot in front of the other, ask a couple of questions, and before you know it, you’re standing on the moon. It’s perfectly natural—that magical place where the wild things are—and we're all headed in that direction together.

Then we grow a little. The dreams diminish, reality looms large, and before you know it, you’re spending Saturday night alone in the laundromat with a dog-eared book and a bag of quarters, pining for a serendipitous ham-on-rye. Life happens all by itself, and the large dreams of little children are driven off by the profit motive and the delicate rinse cycle.

Me, I wanted to do literature. Become an author, a journalist, a playwright, a man of letters. Write the Great American Novel, wear elbow-patched tweed jackets, work in academia, and give insight to wide-eyed youth about that thing that happened that one time over at that place with he or she who shall not be named and about which we shall speak no further hey papers are due Monday.

I somehow went the other way instead—corporate cubicles and cookie-cutter comps—but I have spent decades refining my work in the visual arts, and I did finally get around to writing a book. It may or may not be great, but it is certainly American, and it is novel, and I would like to think that it is not entirely without merit. I mention this only so that I might employ a double-negative, which of course is a no-no.

Unreality now looms large before us, and we have indeed arrived at that place where the wild things are—but these are wild things of an entirely different sort. We find that we are children no longer, living in a world of death and taxes and politics and religion—all the stuff of life that is too powerful to avoid, but too delicate to actually talk about like civilized human beings. Our nation is in crisis, and the entire world is in fact in crisis. One is compelled to search, and to strive, and to speak. And so one tries. More to the point, one dreams.

Come join me in a dream—of a larger world not unlike our own; strange yet familiar; wicked yet wonderful; distant yet just out of reach. A world of wild things and wishes and wide-eyed wonder. A world that we all once knew, and may yet know again.

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