The series Family Snapshots is inspired by Edward Steichen's 1955 exhibition, The Family of Man.

This allows me to throw a wide net using images of all kinds of people from all different backgrounds and nationalities.

These are archetypal images: a mother and child, a woman pregnant with her first child, wedding photos, etc...

These kind of images mark the passage of time and emphasize our mortality evoking memory and interpersonal relationships.

There is a decay/renewal aspect at the core of this work. The first step in my process is a destroying of the image with solvents that cause the emulsion to deteriorate and melt implying not only a painterliness that I strive for, but an animation, energy, a manifestation of aura, breath and life that contradicts our conventional notion of a photograph distilling a moment time.

Through the process of making this work there is an excavation, a literal peeling away of layers to reveal that which lays beneath that has a connotation of exhuming something that has been entombed or buried.

These layers serve as a metaphor for buried histories, layers of personality and identity, what we choose to reveal or obscure, layers of skin, of generations, of self.