There is a fluctuation between visual intuition and an editorial process that presses me to throw out what is not working and to go beyond the content level of individual objects. I work intuitively, but only part of the time. Objects rich in human implications are the ones which interest me. What if each cereal box, grapefruit rind, and hub cap were perceived to have its own moving spirit? Today, some anthropologists try to figure us out by checking our garbage.

Reading objects, Archaeologists search for meaning in bones, earth, and stone. We are learning the rules of the forest, but we know little about the rules of the city dump.

Increasingly there is a manmade landscape too, some of it beneficial and some of it unforeseen and chaotic. In the past, people primarily had to make sense of the natural world. In thinking about the way we understand both contemporary objects and old objects as well as the way people have understood objects at different points in time, I wonder at the vast changes in the human world in an instant of geologic time. All is uncertainty and change, but optimists and bingo players are on the lookout for moments of perfect knowledge and perfect cards. New ideas form, the old are shattered, and sometimes old ideas pop up again among the new like graffiti on a wall. By the seventeenth century, clockwork explanations begin to invade the spirit world, opening doors to modern physics. Animals floated in the night sky, and each object had its own 'Anima Motrix', its’ own moving spirit. For most of human history, people have looked to the spirit world to explain what was going on.

I am interested in the way people think about the unknown. I will not attempt to explain their meaning in verbal terms, because my process is visual, but I can suggest what is on my mind. These photographs have been assembled as a book so that they can speak together.

Define anima motrix