Part 5: Gaining Intimacy

How do we move from presence to participation, from observation to relationship? Gaining Intimacy draws on Barry Lopez’s guidance for engaging with Place not through analysis but through stillness, attention, and reverence. This next part explores how intimacy with a landscape is forged through conversation—not of words, but of senses, silence, and shared presence. What results is not just familiarity, but a kind of nourishment, a generative dialogue that shapes the images we make—and the selves we bring to them.

Part 4: Beginnings

How does the land of childhood shape the artist within us? In Part 4: Beginnings, I reflect on the sonic, visual, and sensory landscapes of my earliest years—fields, forests, meadows, and a sudden Easter apparition splitting the morning fog. Guided by Barry Lopez’s belief that imagination is shaped by early encounters with place, Part 4 traces how formative experiences in upstate New York and northeastern Massachusetts continue to inform my relationship with Place, perception, and the unexpected. These recollections are not nostalgia—they are invitations to remain vulnerable, open, and receptive to the possibilities that emerge even in the most familiar places.

Edges of Form, Part 3: Engagement with Place

What does it mean to truly belong to a place—not just visit or photograph it, but to be shaped by it and to shape your work in conversation with it? In Part 3, I explore the central role of Place in expressive image making. Drawing on insights from Joe Cornish, Barry Lopez, and my own sustained engagement with the Pioneer Valley, this essay examines how forming an intimate, reciprocal relationship with a landscape can expand the edges of photographic form and transform the image-making process itself.

Part 2: Zen Universe

What if you treat each image—like each sentence in a Tom Robbins novel—that is as if it were its own self-contained universe? In Part 2, Zen Universe, I explore how Robbins’ obsessive sentence-by-sentence writing process offers a powerful metaphor for photographic engagement: deliberate, immersive, and present. From Cedric Wright’s “luxurious deliberations” to Ralph Gibson’s embrace of limitations, this essay examines how restriction, routine, and deep intimacy with one’s tools and processes and the places in which we use them can become the groundwork for artistic discovery. Engaging with form begins by locating its boundaries—its edges—and pushing toward them.

Making photographs in the confines of the Pioneer Valley’s layered geography and erased histories has led me to draw inspiration from Tom Robbins, Joe Cornish, Ralph Gibson and others to explore how creative limits can become invitations. Exploring the notion that to evolve as artists, we must engage deliberately with the boundaries that define our work—our tools, places, and selves—so that we can push toward what Robbins calls the “wildest edge of edges,” where artistic discovery and the “realm of magic” await.

What does it mean to push the boundaries of your creative practice—not by abandoning structure, but by confronting it directly? On Engagement with Form is a series that explores this question through the lens of expressive image making, where photography becomes less about replication and more about conversation—with self, with place, and with process.

Over its nearly 15 years, On Landscape, the online magazine for landscape photographers, has become a staple for many in their development and growth as a photographer and artist.  On Landscape’s origin story, told in this blog post, is as nearly as impressive as its reputation for deep discussions on photography, gear, technique embodying a philosophy of lifelong learning and creative engagement—values that continue to inspire photographers and writers alike of all abilities and levels of commitment.  Moreover, On Landscape’s impressive back catalogue of over 300 issues is available to all subscribers and includes articles, essays and reminiscences, as well tips for all forms of photographic expression. OL also played a key role in my growth as a photographer & writer

Monologue with Photography is intended to be, among other things, nothing less than a celebration of photographers, their work, work ethic, skill, dedication, output, and their ability to engage creatively with unfamiliar corners of the globe or merely stood in their “back yard.”