Tetris

While I was photographing, a small machine started running inside me. It wasn’t a planned metaphor. It was Tetris. The shapes seemed to be searching for one another, as though gravity were simply waiting for the exact moment to complete a combination and make room for the next one.

Perhaps there is something of that obsession with fitting things together in the way I photograph. I look for relationships that have not yet been named, bring things from entirely different worlds closer together, and watch what happens when they are no longer perceived in isolation. Photography becomes a mental architecture between event and imagination.

There is pleasure in this process. One piece finds another, a surface calls for continuity, an empty space stops being an absence and becomes a possibility. The game ends when the structure closes; I prefer the moment just before that, when everything remains suspended.

Perhaps that is why I see Tetris where others might see nothing more than a photograph of skateboarding. I am not looking for what things are. What interests me is what happens when one thing encounters another within my perception. For me, photographing is also an exercise in bringing improbable worlds together until, for a few seconds, they seem to have been born together.