There’s a moment, usually brief, when I notice something before I know what it is. Light doing something unexpected to a ridge. A tide pool going still enough to become its own sky. Sandstone holding the shape of water that left sixty million years ago. The recognition comes a half-second later, and with it the labels, the categories, the comfortable sense that I know what I’m looking at. But for that half-second, seeing is just seeing. Nothing sorted. Nothing explained.

That’s what I’m trying to photograph. Which is, admittedly, like trying to carry water in your hands. You can do it, but not for long, and not without losing most of it.

The Pacific Northwest, where I’ve lived half my life, is overwhelmingly loud: everything competing for attention at once. Uppland, where I grew up, withholds almost everything. One taught me to tune out; the other to tune in. The desert and the coast each strip away something else: the desert hides nothing, including you; the sea is featureless enough to turn you back on yourself. What connects the images isn’t geography. It’s attention.

I shoot Hasselblad medium format, both digital and analog, and sometimes other full-frame digital cameras. The choice of format matters less than what it does to the pace of working: medium format slows me down, asks for commitment, and then has to get out of the way entirely. The slowness isn’t an aesthetic choice (or not only one). It’s how I get the analytical mind to quiet down long enough for the other kind of seeing to come through. The deliberateness of the process and the openness of the perception aren’t in conflict. One makes room for the other. Though I’ll admit there are days when the deliberateness just produces blisters and the openness produces nothing at all.

The lineage I find myself drawn to is the contemplative tradition in photography: Minor White’s insistence that the photographer’s inner state matters as much as the subject, though where he had the discipline to compose images for the viewer I’m usually just trying not to scare off whatever I’ve stumbled into; Sugimoto’s long reductions of sea and sky to the edge of recognition; Wynn Bullock’s desire to let the landscape speak for itself, though he showed up with Einstein and Whitehead in his back pocket and I show up with an empty head and a heavy camera. Simone Weil wrote that attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but I understand the impulse. Turn it around and it gets harder to argue with: you can’t care about something you’ve never really looked at.

My current work moves in two directions. At the Threshold is a series of water photographs exploring the boundary between representation and abstraction, where familiar surfaces dissolve into light, texture, and gesture. Settled Land (not yet published) is a longer project connecting the landscapes of Uppland, Sweden and the American West through comparative geology and personal displacement, what it means to see one place through the ghost of another. Both are attempts to hold a specific quality of attention: partial, quiet, open-ended. Fragments of something felt before it was understood.

What I’m trying to do is simple, though not easy. To see clearly, before I understand. And to make a photograph that lets someone else stand in that same half-second, if they’re willing.

Explore the galleries or read more in Field Notes.