Diptychs

A good photograph should always tell the viewer a story. With these diptychs, I’m literally sharing two sides of the same story. I find them to be a more complete expression of a place and a moment in time.

I stumbled upon diptychs in my artwork quite by accident while working in my print studio curating through the images I made of San Francisco Bay. I often create my Chromascapes by photographing into a sunrise or sunset. I love the contrast, color, and sky variations of those scenes. Using the bright part of the sky as a focal point, I pull and abstract that light left or right into the darker sky and landscape. It’s a great effect that captures the feeling of a moment and place. Once I’m back in my print studio, I pick the strongest images from a location, make work prints, and stick them on my steel viewing wall to choose a single hero image. While studying two images side-by-side from Sausalito, weighing the differences between the left and right sides of the sunrise, the diptych revealed itself to me. Those two separate Chromascapes when viewed together told a fuller story of San Francisco Bay from that morning than either one on their own. In that moment, a whole new collection of Chromascapes was born and my ability to share the story of a place suddenly had more language.

It is important to know these diptychs are two individual Chromascapes that are paired together. None of these are a single Chromascape broken into two parts. It is impossible for me to capture the left and right sides of these scenes in a single exposure. If I could, there would be no diptychs, just a single Chromascape. It is precisely because I abstract the light into the darker edges of the scene that these diptychs exist. It is also why there are variations in the scenes where the two Chromascapes meet in the center of the diptych. With each Chromascape, I am abstracting and blending color and structure from different parts of the sky and landscape, which results in a similar but different interpretation of the scene where the images meet. Together the diptychs are perfectly imperfect and I'm in love with them for this reason.