My photography is deeply rooted in my love of cinema. Watching Sinbad do battle with sabre-tooth tigers and giant Harryhausen monsters in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Mario Bava's psychedelic Hercules in the Haunted World, and the endless onslaught of anthropomorphized denizens from Monster Island sent by Toho to wreak havoc on a curiously unsuspecting Tokyo, kept my youthful Sunday afternoons occupied with flights of fancy. Likewise, my father at the time also encouraged me to watch movies that were beyond my ability to comprehend, immersing me in Northern European existentialism, French avant-garde, and American noir. Then again, he did take me to see Jaws while vacationing in Montauk one summer.

I realize it may seem odd to make the jump from films steeped in the human condition to photos of magnified insects, but for me the connection is not too difficult. I approach my subjects with the intent of conveying all of the emotion and expression that I can get them to show. For me they are creatures of great feeling and contemplation, at least on the surface. The subjects, insects instead of human beings, provide me a way of exploring the ideas and emotions that can be difficult when doing portraiture with a human face - people tend to get caught up in the specific person. I do not make much distinction between what I do and what a portrait photographer does.

Working in black and white allows me to explore these ideas in an even more dissociated way. With the absence of color comes the appreciation of tone, line, and form. The same subjects are rendered differently. Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal would have been very different had it been shot in color, and film noir simply would not have manifested. In my photography I use a similar approach - abstracting aspects of humanity through the looking glass of other-worldly creatures, hopefully achieving something more human than human, as it were.

Most of my subjects are victims of my front porch light, its bright glow a siren song to the sailors of the night air. Others are found on dusty, ill-lit, spider-patrolled windowsills. Their lifeless bodies are gathered periodically and I begin each photo session by picking through them to find the subjects that stand out most to me - sometimes the specimens are perfectly preserved, other times there is more missing than present. I do almost no pre-planning of my photos, rather I find a subject, examine it to find its personality, then place, light, and photograph it. The entire process is almost automatic, as if the subject is telling me what to do. I merely facilitate its spectral will. It is very rare for me to use a subject again in more than one photo, although some of them have shown up repeatedly.

Lighting is always a challenge and I have devised a system of high-output, low-heat fluorescent lights that provide enough light to work with, yet do not cause my subjects to burst into flames. I learned that lesson the hard way. Exposure times can be brutal, sometimes several minutes each. I often blow smoke through the composition and it is all too easy to blow the subjects out of position.