Time

At some point, a thing becomes more than what it once was. Its surface begins to tell the story of the time it has endured. That is where my attention goes. I am not looking for age as a visual quality. I am looking for change itself, and for the way time leaves that change behind as evidence.

Time began with railway structures, industrial machinery, and surfaces slowly overtaken by rust. But the series is not about old things, and it is not about ruins. What draws me in is the chance to encounter, in the material itself, a history I never witnessed. Rust makes a hidden process visible. Years of change eventually become something we can see.

I have come to think that time does not actually pass. We do. We are born, we grow, we wear down, and eventually we disappear. Time does none of these things. It simply remains as everything around us changes. Perhaps that is why we recognize its presence so clearly in the things it transforms.

A photograph gives us a brief interruption in our own passage. By the time we look at an image again, the thing we photographed has already changed. The surface continues its transformation while the photograph holds on to a version of it that the world has already begun to leave behind.

That is what I am looking for in Time. The next photograph could be a wall, a plant pushing through a tiny crack, a tree, a painting, a landscape, a machine, or a building. I have no predetermined inventory of subjects and no idea where the series will end. The only requirement is that I recognize a transformation worth stopping for.

Maybe photography is, in part, a way of paying attention to what time leaves behind. We cannot photograph time itself. We can photograph what time does.

What remains may not be a memory at all. It may be a change so deeply absorbed into a thing that it becomes part of what that thing is. Some transformations happen without anyone there to witness them. They do not need an audience. They only need someone to notice.

That is where Time exists: in the space between what has already happened and what has not yet finished changing.