This body of work is a series that I started in the summer of 2002. I come from a small town in Canada called Southampton located on one of the Great Lakes: Lake Huron. Since moving to Los Angeles, I return home every summer for five weeks.

In the summer, Southampton is a small lake resort town where the locals and summer cottagers spend long, lazy days relaxing and enjoying the lake. Where I live in Los Angeles is really the “concrete jungle” and the pace of life in LA compared to Southampton is worlds apart which affects the way I approach photography. In my hometown in Canada, the pace of life is very slow and relaxed. I had always wanted to photograph the lake, but was never able to quite capture the way the lake “felt” to me. There is a quality to the light that is strong yet at the same time soft and sensual with wonderful cloud formations that can be quite dramatic. I wanted to capture two things in this series; the lake light and people interacting with the lake.

The images that came closest to what I was trying to achieve with this series were from the Pictorialist movement in the late 1800’s. The Pictorialists believed that making a photograph shouldn’t be merely the detailed recording of an external object in a certain time and place but a rendering of the appearance of reality with the artists’ subjective experience integrated into the final image. The pictorialists and their ideas excited me. Their images were often dark, moody, soft and dreamlike. I knew that this was how I saw and felt the lake.

I wanted my images to have a sense of suspended time meaning that they look like they could have been taken in present time or sometime in the past almost like a memory. And like most memories there is an element of visual and emotional aspects at work. There are two realities in a photograph; the physical reality of the object being recorded by the camera and the emotional reality. The artist can decide to give weight to either one of them. The emotional aspect and impact of what an image can evoke is what currently interests and excites me about photography.