Awareness
Where Observation attends to what is present, and Perception investigates how meaning forms and shifts, Awareness reflects a movement from accumulation toward integration. Having spent much of my life gathering experiences, knowledge, and ideas, I now find myself engaged in reflection—bringing those elements into perspectives that feel stable, inhabitable, and resolved.
The images in this book are not about heightened attention or visual acuity. They emerge from perspectives I have learned to trust. They represent the discovery of a photographic language capable of expressing internal coherence. These photographs do not seek meaning; they carry it.
Awareness, in this context, describes a place where the outer experiential world and the inner self meet and remain—without effort, without analysis. The work does not ask the viewer to decode or interpret. Instead, it invites a quieter form of engagement shaped by time, lived experience, and a settled way of seeing.
In the early years of my photographic journey, I was energized by technique and by the satisfaction of making images that pleased me—or others. Over time, that was no longer enough. I began searching for something deeper, though I did not yet know what it was.
I experimented widely: writing, teaching, workshops, mentors, competitions, and graduate study. Each step contributed something, yet the central question remained unnamed. The most difficult task was not technical mastery, but identifying what I was truly looking for and finding language for it.
The more I read and reflected, the more I realized that this restlessness is common among artists. I also recognized that few ideas are entirely new. Whatever feels original to us has likely appeared in some form centuries before. What changes is not novelty, but relationship.
I have heard photographers claim they make work only for themselves and do not care what others think. My instinct has always resisted that position. Most of us seek validation. The problem is that much of it is fleeting—one ribbon, one “like,” one exhibition. It satisfies briefly, then dissolves. It does not resolve the deeper question.
Out of this long period of searching, a series of smaller projects began to coalesce into what became the OPA framework—Observation, Perception, Awareness. It emerged gradually as I tried to understand both photography and myself: my philosophical leanings, my artistic tendencies, and the images that had remained meaningful to me over time.
I have been influenced by Paul Caponigro, Edward Weston, and Minor White. Caponigro sought to understand where vision originates. Weston aimed to clearly present his feelings for life through photographic beauty. White used photography as a vehicle for spiritual exploration and self-discovery.
Where they pursued understanding, expression, or transformation, my work has increasingly moved toward coherence. I am not looking beyond experience, nor attempting to transcend it. I am allowing the outer world to meet an interior that has become grounded enough to receive it.
Awareness became the name I gave to this condition. I had recognized it in certain photographs for years but could not explain why they felt different. Eventually I arrived at a working definition:
The moment when the outer experiential world and the inner self meet, without effort, without analysis.
If Observation is encounter and Perception is engagement, then Awareness is relationship. In Awareness, the photograph arrives after effort is no longer central and meaning is no longer pursued. The image feels less constructed than realized.
Awareness feels earned across the arc of a life, yet quiet within a single photograph. It is not dramatic. It is not declarative. It does not insist. It simply stands in coherence.
These images mark that arrival—not as a conclusion, but as a steadier way of being with the world.