At an early I became fascinated with the equipment, strategies and history of warfare. No other set of conflicts had such power to fascinate and shock as the First and Second World Wars. The storybook bad guys I had known – outlaws in black hats and cold hearted gangsters -– were eclipsed by grainy newsreel characters of pure evil and the victorious armies that laid their vile empires to waste. My interests in these human conflicts (the events leading to them, the peoples and cultures involved, and their effectual outcomes) endure.
The community with which I have become involved is committed to researching and re-staging details of the world wars of the twentieth century. The tragic orchestrations of Hitler and Stalin, among others, provide a complex backdrop before which contemporary individuals re-stage and re-examine the tumultuous events that gave birth to the modern era.
How is it that we can embrace and detach the look of war from the intentions of its creators and perpetrators? How are we to understand the perplexity of the factual and ideological details these enactments suggest? I make photographs with a desire to discover and explore the many questions and contradictions inherent in the seductive, malignant nature of war's aesthetic.
