It may be these few comments will be of use in looking at my work from the last twenty years.
I had no aspirations of becoming an artist when I attended the Tokyo College of Photography in the mid 70's. Photography was a technology for reproducing the world around me and I was simply part of the medium; I thought all I had to do was click the shutter, retire to the darkroom, and finish the images. Though the time I spent at college in Tokyo was fundamental in turning around this view of photography, art was not yet a factor in my interest in photography.
Later in Minneapolis, my contact to other students and to teachers at Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and also the artists at the Binz project in Zürich, Switzerland, provided me with a basis for an approach not only to photography, but to art in general.
Since then I have slowly begun to see that the image-making process is not simply about a step by step movement to a predetermined point of one's own design, but that the greater tapestry of image-making deals with a cumulative sensibility. We are involved in an encounter with the way our world rises up in and around us and contributions to this are relevant/valid in their own time, culture, or context. That is, there can be no prescribed format, but rather that equilibrium has much to do with the viability of interpretation.
I feel it is a spiritual level we aspire to in art and that art is in effect a rendezvous with the meaning of that spirit. As we make our steps we describe elusive elements in our midst, ones that are continuously transforming themselves, yet are integral parts of our consciousness.