Artist Statement

I've been fascinated both visually and conceptually with Industrial sites since I was very young, especially cargo ships and ports, constantly amazed to think that these are the structures that operate the world on many levels. When I started the Cargo project, initially I gravitated towards the formal qualities of stacked containers. But I quickly turned my attention to the infrastructure of the cargo shipping world, photographing huge ships as they move in and out of ports and the movement of the containers. I realized that as consumers who depend on these goods that come from overseas, we have almost no understanding of how things get here.

Using a 4x5 camera and as well as a medium format camera (for those tricky, hard to access places), I spent almost 2 years photographing at the New York Container Terminal in Staten Island. In order to understand fully what it takes to move containers, I joined the M.V. Charles Island, a cargo ship, for almost 2 weeks on a trip from NY through the Panama Canal to Ecuador.

The resulting photographs reveal an almost invisible network of human and technological activity.

For me, it's always about the big picture and trying to understand how things work. Photography is my process of discovery and that expression of fascination with what I find.