Why some things can say more without ever speaking
There are certain things we seem to recognize before anyone has explained what they mean. A crown. A key. A doorway left slightly open. A flower beginning to wilt. A candle burning alone in a dark room. A piece of fruit held carefully between someone's hands. On their own, these are ordinary things. A key opens a lock. A flower blooms and eventually dies. A doorway simply allows us to move from one room into another. Yet the moment we place any of them inside a painting, a photograph, a story, or even a dream, something changes. We begin to wonder why it is there.
Who does the key belong to? What waits beyond the doorway? Why was the flower chosen? Why is she holding that particular object, and why does it feel important?
Human beings have been asking questions like these of images for thousands of years. Long before photography existed, we filled paintings, sculptures, architecture, clothing, jewelry, manuscripts, and sacred spaces with objects that meant more than their practical purpose. Artists painted flowers that represented virtues, animals that revealed something about the person standing beside them, fruit that suggested abundance or mortality, and colors that could communicate status, devotion, grief, desire, or danger. Entire stories could exist inside a single image without a sentence ever being written across it.
I have always found that fascinating, perhaps because it says something about the way we experience images in the first place. We don't simply look at them. We search them.
We notice where someone's eyes are directed and wonder what they are looking toward. We recognize the difference between a hand reaching for something and one pulling away. We understand that placing one figure above another changes the relationship between them, even if nobody tells us why. We notice when something is illuminated and when something else has been deliberately allowed to disappear into shadow. We make connections almost instinctively, gathering tiny pieces of visual information until some kind of story begins forming in our minds.
The wonderful complication is that the story isn't always the same for everyone.
Red can mean love, passion, violence, danger, blood, celebration, sexuality, anger, or something deeply personal that has nothing to do with any of those things. A flower can represent life to one person and grief to another. Darkness can feel threatening, peaceful, protective, mysterious, or sacred. Even something as seemingly straightforward as a key can suggest freedom, responsibility, secrecy, captivity, knowledge, possibility, or simply the anticipation of discovering what lies behind a locked door.
The object hasn't changed. The person looking at it has.
That relationship between intention and interpretation is one of the things I love most about making conceptual photographs. When I begin building an image, there is absolutely a story happening in my own mind. I research. I collect references. I think about mythology and art, but I also think about color, texture, costume, light, body language, and the objects that might naturally belong within the world I'm creating. I consider what someone should be holding, where another person should stand, whether their eyes should meet, and whether a particular detail should announce itself immediately or wait quietly in the photograph until someone notices it.
Very little of that is accidental.
But I also don't particularly want to stand beside the finished photograph and explain all of it.
There is a temptation with conceptual work to provide the viewer with an answer key: this object means this, this color represents that, this gesture refers to this particular story. I understand why. When you've spent so much time creating something intentionally, naturally you want people to understand what you were trying to say. Yet I think explaining everything can sometimes make the experience smaller rather than larger.
If I place a key in someone's hand and immediately tell you exactly what that key represents, I've eliminated every other possibility before you've had the chance to consider one.
Perhaps you see freedom. Perhaps you see access. Perhaps you think about something being protected. Perhaps you wonder what has been locked away. Perhaps somewhere in your own life a key carries an association I could never have anticipated when I made the photograph. My intention still exists; I haven't surrendered it simply because you experienced something different, but now another story exists alongside mine.
That is where art becomes particularly interesting to me.
It becomes a conversation between what the artist intended and what the viewer brings with them.
This doesn't mean that anything placed inside an image automatically becomes meaningful simply because we call it symbolic. If anything, leaving room for interpretation requires the artist to be even more deliberate. I need to understand why something belongs inside my photograph even if I never tell you. I need to think about what changes when an object is held rather than placed on a table, when one person offers it to another, when someone protects it, ignores it, desires it, or simply allows it to exist beside them. I need to consider what happens when I illuminate something beautifully and what happens when I barely allow you to see it at all.
The smallest decision can completely change the sentence without changing any of its words.
That is something I've been thinking about while creating some of my recent work. I have always loved elaborate imagery, the costuming, the sets, the textures, the theatricality of transforming an ordinary studio into somewhere that feels as though it might exist just beyond reality. That process is part of the joy for me. But increasingly, I find myself drawn to the quieter pieces inside those larger scenes. Sometimes the enormous gown isn't carrying the story at all. Sometimes it is a hand hovering above another hand, an object held between two people, a particular direction of the eyes, or something small enough that you might not notice it until the second or third time you look.
Those details fascinate me because they require participation. They don't simply show us something beautiful; they give us a question.
And perhaps this is why mythology continues to find its way into my work. Myths themselves function much like symbols. They have traveled through cultures and centuries precisely because they can survive being interpreted again and again. The stories remain recognizable, but what we find inside them changes. Figures who once represented one thing can become interesting to us for entirely different reasons. Stories we first encountered as tales of gods, monsters, heroes, punishment, or transformation can suddenly feel remarkably human when we return to them later in life.
The mythology gives me somewhere to begin, but I don't feel particularly interested in illustrating it exactly as it has already been told. There are paintings, sculptures, books, and thousands of years of storytelling that have already done that beautifully. What interests me is taking those familiar fragments and asking what else might exist inside them. What happens when the character is allowed to become something slightly different? What happens when two familiar symbols occupy the same frame? What changes when we shift who appears powerful, who appears vulnerable, who guides, who chooses, or who simply watches?
I am a I know the story I was thinking about when I made the photograph.
I know why I chose the objects that are there, why the light falls where it does, why one hand reaches while another remains still, and why certain colors occupy the world around them.
But you don't need to know any of that before you look.
In fact, I'd rather you didn't.
I'd rather you have a moment before explanation arrives. A moment to notice something, make an association, invent a possibility, remember something entirely unrelated, or simply feel drawn toward a detail without quite knowing why. Maybe eventually you'll discover the mythology behind the image. Maybe you'll recognize it immediately. Maybe you'll create a completely different story and never think about the original one at all.
There is room for all of that.
Because once a photograph leaves my camera and enters someone else's world, something rather wonderful happens. I still know what I intended, but I no longer get to decide everything it can mean. The person standing in front of it brings their own history, memories, imagination, fears, desires, and experiences into the conversation.
Somewhere between what I created and what you discovered, the image becomes something neither of us could have made entirely alone.
And maybe that is why symbols have survived for so long.
They give us something familiar enough to recognize, mysterious enough to question, and open enough to make our own.
They give us something familiar enough to recognize, mysterious enough to question, and open enough to make our own.
Come Tell a Story of Your Own
The symbols we carry are rarely meaningless. A flower, a color, an old story, a piece of jewelry, a character you have never quite forgotten; sometimes the smallest things hold entire pieces of who we are.
If there is a story, idea, or imagined version of yourself that you have been carrying with you, I would love to help you bring it into the frame. Together, we can create something that begins with your story but leaves enough room for discovery along the way.