here are two examples of the first
cameraless photographs (photograms)
i made following a creative epiphany
i had in 1990 relating to a longstanding
practical dissatisfaction i had with
traditional painting's conspicuous
stroke-follows-stroke linearity.

i asked myself, "what if a mark
or gesture can be seen as a removal
or subtraction from a sum, what is
the shape of all that remains?"

i immediately began reconfiguring
my strategic-tactical relationships
to process and technique and begin
exploring a different conception of
my forming intention as a diagrammatic
field; a probabilistic set of approximations
limited by outcomes of reductive choice
(elimination) and the functional frames
of creative and formal intent.

these initial investigations embraced
the materials and chemistries of the paper-
and-lens-based photographic tradition, but
no cameras were used. ordinary found objects,
selected for their ability to block, focus, transmit,
or disperse light, functioned as three-dimensional
matrices or "negatives" which generated a wide
variety of cast shadow types. these shadows
recorded the reverse (or opposite) of studio
conditions that could not be directly
observed by the naked eye.

working "blindly"—in reverse, in the dark,
and all at once—i engineered and recorded
improvised and transient patterns of shadow
play which formally severed the relationship
between sign and signifier; image and referent.

by the time my 1993 show,
“speaking from the shadow of doubt”
opened at the jamison thomas gallery
in portland, a strong conceptual and formal
"dislocation" had been firmly insinuated
into my work. this dislocation stymied
most viewers' urges and abilities to
forensically recover or otherwise find
meaning in the work by giving each piece
a subject and each subject a name.

this is one of the earliest photograms that
employed a simple figure-ground relationship.

by severing the image matrix from the resulting
image—and the source object from its linguistic
referent—what emerged was something akin
to a "portrait" of a non-retinal entity
whose actual form remains obscure
and essentially fugitive in nature.