Artist Statement

I see Chicago as an architectural national park.

The city streets are not merely streets. They are canyons of stone, steel, and glass, cut deep between monumental walls, like the canyons of the Southwest. The Chicago River moves through the city like a force of nature, as the Colorado River carves through the Grand Canyon. At sunrise, the Chicago skyline along Lake Michigan rises with the quiet authority of a mountain range, luminous and majestic, like the Tetons in Wyoming.

Chicago, to me, is not only urban. It is elemental.

As a photographer, I am not looking to create another postcard view of Chicago. I am not an architectural photographer either, in the conventional sense. I do not aim to capture an entire building in a single frame. The building is not the subject.

I am searching for something more distilled: symmetry, pattern, form, tension, silence. I look for the moment when architecture stops being real estate and becomes poetry. A facade becomes a cliff face. A row of windows becomes a rhythm. A shadow cutting across stone becomes a revelation.

These are the same buildings that thousands of people pass every day. Most barely notice them. I return to them again and again because I believe there is always another way to see. Photography, for me, is not a matter of collecting landmarks. It is a process of interpretation. The camera is not a recording device. It is a thinking device. It is a tool of selection, reduction, and transformation.

A painter begins with a blank canvas and adds to it. Every stroke is an addition, a decision to put something where there was nothing. The imagination works outward, inventing a world from inside.

A photographer works in reverse. The world is already too full, too loud, too crowded, too accidental. My task is to remove. I stand in front of a city that has too much in it, and I crop out the chaos. I find the frame that makes the disorder disappear. What is left is the city distilled to its essential geometry. The creative act in photography is not addition. It is subtraction. But by showing less, I try to say more.

I work in black and white to reinforce this idea.

Color belongs to description. Black and white belongs to structure. It clarifies. It reduces architecture to its essentials. It reveals the bones of a building, the force of a form and shape, the collision of brightness and shadow. In black and white, Chicago becomes more itself, more austere, more timeless, more severe, more poetic. The city sheds fashion and noise, standing before us in its pure form.

My photographs are meant to be experienced as monumental prints. At a scale of five or six feet, the image stops behaving like a picture and begins to occupy space like a physical presence. Architecture demands that kind of scale. A building is not small, and the photograph that represents it should not feel small either. Large prints allow the viewer to step closer, explore the surface, and feel the weight and structure of the city.

The pursuit of scale is the reason I work with gigapixel photography. Instead of capturing a scene in a single exposure, I construct the image from a mosaic of hundreds of overlapping shots stitched together into one immense field of detail. This process preserves the smallest textures of stone, glass, and steel, allowing the photograph to remain precise and alive even when printed at monumental size. What would disappear in a conventional image remains visible, becoming a place to explore, where you can move through layers of detail much like walking through the city itself.

You may see this as a body of work about Chicago architecture. I see it as a way to make sense of the world and find meaning in my life. Aldous Huxley wrote: "Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil." I did not choose architectural photography because I admired buildings. I chose it because I needed to redeem something. The buildings were available. The chaos was already there.

I will tell you a secret: it is not about Chicago architecture at all. That is just the means. The real subject of this work is me. I am trying to answer questions that have no comfortable answers. Why am I drawn to symmetry? Why does pattern calm something in me that nothing else calms? Why do I need the chaos cropped out before I can breathe?

As you may have guessed, we are no longer talking about photography. We are exploring the architecture of existence, connecting personal patterns to universal questions about being and meaning. Every artist who ever made anything was asking the same questions.

Anton Chekhov understood this. He once said, “The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.” I have spent years believing that was modesty. I now believe it is precision. The question is the work. The answer, if it ever arrives, ends the work. You do not want the work to end.

I have a question. A question you are not supposed to ask. Which gave me an answer you are not supposed to know.

Would you like to know the question?