The Completion Backward Principle

Musicians call it a remix. They reimagine a song, often layering it with different drum tracks or orchestration or harmonies. In digital photography, we can remix images to our hearts' delight because the changes are non-destructive. 

I spent the holidays at home recently and decided to see what would happen if I could combine some of my recent street work, both documentary and abstract. And that quickly evolved into reexamining a little older work with gamers and models. And then I opened the digital floodgates and started pulling in textures I’d shot six or seven years ago in the U.S. and Europe. And then all hell broke loose but in a good way. 

So, what is this all about? Not sure I can explain this better than my beloved S.F. band The Tubes. This quasi-punk band once released an album and a jokey video called the Completion Backward Principle — “the imagination creates reality” — which still rings untrue today. Until now, I didn’t know what I was missing.

As I write this in late January, I’m developing a series of urban portraits, with other projects underway.

A reimagined urban portrait featuring Eilyn Escalante from the series Re-envisioning.

Through a looking glass

What can an abstract image tell us about a changing man-made environment? This image called Untitled 3 is from my latest project, still in development, called Night Glass.

After spending a year documenting my city in turmoil and transition, I’ve embraced abstraction to explore how I’ve changed—and am now seeing things differently.  The photos express what I’d rather not parse into words— a glassy layer removed from what’s actually happening on these streets and behind these windows.

Let me know what you think—I’m previewing a range of them on my Instagram page. Stay safe.

Unrealized

Night occupies a prominent space in the murky area between dreams and reality. But night is a tricky canvas. When our vision is obscured, we misperceive our surroundings, and things don’t always add up. The interplay of light and movement can distort our perception and our awareness. Yet our innate powers of pattern recognition enable us to stitch together a sense of place or even intuit an emotion from the barest of details. These nocturnal images spotlight our urban anxieties — and false impressions that can happen in the blink of a shutter.

Work from the series Unrealized was selected by The Photo Review, a publication, in 2018, and juried competitions in both 2018 and 2019 by Black Box Gallery in Portland, Oregon. In April 2019, four of these images appeared in a BAPC group show at the Dohjidai gallery in Kyoto, Japan — part of KYOTOGRAPHIE (KG+) international photography festival. In January, 2020, a photo from the series called Hesitation earned first place in an L.A. Photo Curator competition in January called “No Happy Accidents.”

The Unrealized images were shot primarily in San Francisco, Oakland and Southern California in 2017, 2018 and 2019.