I began to fully appreciate photography as an expressive medium when I started to understand painting. On this journey of understanding, the words of Georgia O’Keefe struck with particular force, “Nothing is less real than realism… it is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.” But are painting and photography just about the “meaning of things”? I think not and wish O’Keefe had stopped and placed her period after the word “meaning.”

Long fascinated by the landscape, urban and natural, I’ve been sensitive to the work of the new topographers, especially Robert Adams, though I find this work infused with a dreary pessimism which I deeply appreciate but can’t share. I spent over a decade from the mid 1990s until 2006 trying to see the land and the city in a way that was, for me, emotionally true. In mid-2006 I began to experiment with images that were fragments of an entire scene, sometimes highly abstracted in terms of colour, reflection, layering and sharpness. Suddenly I was excited and at the same time dismayed; the work so dramatically superseded in emotional truth anything in the thousands and thousands of negatives I’d made before. I’m dismayed I may never print these negatives again.

The first images in this series, titled When the City Isn’t Looking, were the subject of a one-person show at the Gallery of Photographic Arts – Canada, in Calgary’s Art Central in November of 2008. Bringing this work together was a real breakthrough, freeing me of the pessimism of the new topographers and freeing me to work in an intuitive, highly abstract manner. My city is a very human city – intuited in the personification of the title. Perhaps the work can best be characterized as a dialogue between a newer, more optimistic urban topographic and a sensibility of light, colour, space and texture that treats the city itself as abstract art.

The images in When the City Isn’t Looking are all “straight” photographs in the sense that no elements are added or combined. Only ordinary controls like contrast, saturation, dodging and burning have been applied. I print each image individually as an artist’s print in a lifetime-limited edition. The image as object is artistically important; therefore each image is mounted, matted and framed to a high standard.