in collaboration with

Tyler Green FX Studio & Unlocking CT

My work serves as an homage to a forgotten place, Fairfield Hills State Hospital in Newtown, CT. Built in 1930, the hospital closed its doors in 1995 after housing thousands of patients on its 185-acre campus. For a hospital that, during construction, made it a point to create an environment with no dark corners or cubbyholes, it seems to hold a dark past that most would choose to ignore or forget about.

When thinking of an insane asylum, beautiful is not the first word that comes to most people’s minds, but I have been fascinated by this place ever since I first saw it. For the past decade, I have been drawn to the dark beauty that the campus still holds and have been attempting to preserve it through photography before it gets torn down. Using aerial photography, staged models, and thousands of other digital photographs, I have been creating a record of this hospital so its stories are no longer silenced behind the metal fences and “No Trespassing” signs.

in•ter•fer•ence

The process in which two or more light, sound, or electromagnetic waves of the same frequency combine to reinforce or cancel each other, the amplitude of the resulting wave being equal to the sum of the amplitudes of the combining waves.

The photos were taken with a large format 4x5 camera inspired by the work of Gregory Crewdson.

As a photographer I don’t take photographs, I make them. These images are set in everyday life exploring the middle class social environment. I enjoy utilizing places that we occupy in our daily lives or settings that we wish we got a chance to inhabit and present them in a theatric, cinematic style. The photographs utilize the cropping style of modern day feature films and attempt to create a drama that will suspend the viewer’s disbelief. The work serves almost as a film still from the opening scene of a motion picture. The viewer is then asked to press play to carry out the narrative.

This work has been influenced by several photographers: Gregory Crewdson for his obsessive attention to detail and importance of lighting, Sally Mann for her honest facial expressions and beautiful use of depth of field, and David Hilliard for his theatrical approaches to creating surreal moments in realistic environments.

The casual gaze that is captured can say so much because we are not informed of anything else other than the subject being lost in their own world for a short time. We are invited at this point to share a moment with someone completely disconnected from us. The images exhibit that instant when there is no longer influence from the world around them. The use of the panoramic stitching technique, sometimes bringing over 40 images together into a single print. This creates a window into a world that we normally cannot see at once with just the naked eye.

The photographs are meant to draw a line between truth and fiction by creating images that appear believable. However, the use of dreamlike lighting, body language, and props pushes them into another realm. Although they are constructed with a suggested meaning, they are left open and vague enough so viewers may still use their own imagination to form the final story, becoming the storytellers themselves. The images present a moment where it appears that something is just about to happen or has just happened. The photographs appear to serve as a moment of breath between scenes.

Visual metaphors of real psychological problems that typically go unnoticed.

These images were taken digitally for a future book titled, "Guardian Angel."

These images, taken with 35mm color film and printed in the color darkroom, are my response to vintage fashion advertisements.