Things as Real as Surreal

Photography found me around 1984 while I was studying the History of Art.

Photography found me around 1984 while I was studying the History of Art. My first cameras included Rolleiflex, Nikon F3, Polaroid - it was a great time for experimentation. The darkroom was my “Wunderkammer”. Then life dealt me a blow. I was diagnosed with leukemia and underwent a bone marrow transplantation which saved by life. Out of the darkroom into the light. I switched to color photography as I no longer wanted to handle photographic chemicals and spend time in a badly ventilated darkroom.

As I regained strength, I began to explore my immediate environment and experimented with color film. I built small theater spaces and populated them with objects, cut outs, fabric, paint, postcards, food and much more to tell stories. Glass and mirrors were incorporated into the set-up to create illusionary 3-dimensionality and unreal spaces. That is how my first color collages came about. This was a fun process and the joy of being alive and humor seeped into my work.

This series of photographs is negative based and printed as C-prints.