For over twenty five years I have been shooting images that document the overlooked landscapes and man-made artifacts of everyday life. I've approached the photographic process with a curiosity for what these scenes tell us about the culture that we live in. In 1999 I began to work with multiple images printed together in grids. While editing and assembling images for the resulting series, called Artifacts, I noticed that some combinations of images, particularly vertical pairs, stood out in a very noticeable way. They had charisma. In the grids such a discovery was often a problem because the pairs might call too much attention to themselves and detract from the overall composition. Sometimes I'd have to split them up and other times I found that they could lend a spark to part of the grid without stealing the show.
Either way it was hard to forget these compelling combinations. So I began to collect and look for more of them. It turns out that there are lots of ways that two images presented together can create something different. A new interesting composition can be the result of two major visual masses in each image playing off of each other in a surprising way. Or the colors in the images can do the same. Or one composition can echo the other but with a twist. Sometimes a shape or line in one image seems to continue a vector that begins in the other.
Many analogies come to mind. I think about two people in a couple, two voices in a duet, or two dishes comprising a meal. And I think of language because I have long been a collector of words as well as images. Phrases that I encountered decades ago still stick in my memory. "Liquid bulldozers" from a documentary about glaciers, and "volunteer corn" from a farming magazine. Pairings like these have a way of opening the mind and letting it thrill to the possibilities of language. A similar reaction to these pairings of images keeps me looking for more and I hope that what I find is as interesting to viewers as it is to me.
Dyads II, the second round of this series, continues this line of exploration after revisiting the grid format with the previous series Artefactos.