Tafoni is the name given by geologists to the unusual and often beautiful honeycomb formations and shallow caverns created by natural weathering processes in the sandstone outcroppings occurring in the mountains that ring San Francisco Bay. This is a phenomenon that occurs only in a few places in the world.

    Tafoni afford the intrepid photographer some interesting challenges physically, technically and aesthetically. Physically, because Tafoni occur on precipitous slopes; technically, because of the mostly dark spaces which may require exposures of several minutes; and, aesthetically, because the formations while visually interesting often don’t seem to work well in the conventional black and white print.

    It was while mulling over these negatives on my light box that it occurred to me that the negative image was almost invariably much more interesting to me than the resulting positive print. Thus began the Tafoni Project.

    There is scant mention of the negative print as an aesthetic object in any of the major texts on the history of photography and the only photographer, to my knowledge, who devoted a significant amount of energy to the negative print was Wynn Bullock in the early 1970s. The negative print has its own peculiar form of beauty. White and black trade places and only middle gray remains unchanged.

    While searching the internet for Tafoni, I came across a site for Ayers Rock in Australia.  I was fascinated to learn that the Aborigines had incorporated numerous Tafoni sites in their Creation Mythology. This discovery caused me to reflect on the deep spiritual feelings that I have had in these spaces and I began to wonder if the indigenous Ohlone people had similar feelings.

    In the Tafoni deep shadows become sources of symbolic light, giving the imagery a nether world fantasy quality, which effectively cuts the moorings to our conventional conception of "reality." This allows the mind a much freer reign where our sense of spatial orientation is frequently lost and is thus replaced by a much less constricted vision. These cavernous landscapes become evocative "mindscapes", a fantasy world which invites subjective interpretation. There are mysterious spaces to explore and fantastic forms to be experienced. Spaces where tonal values are reversed can become an alternate reality, perhaps analogous to the astrophysicist’s concept of worlds composed of anti-matter.

    I invite the viewer to join with me in a journey through these fascinating spaces.

A wave breaks upon the beach. Its vigor spent, it makes its way back to the ocean. The forms revealed by the receding water are charged with significance by virtue of their kinship with the same forms within my body. I try to still my thoughts and be as impressionable to the subtle impulses which arise from my unconscious as the sand is to the water which forms it.

The sand patterns become the source material for my figures of fantasy. Forming images in this way is of its very nature a rather unpredictable activity. Theodore Roethke speaking of the unconscious said, "you can take a dive in and you can come up with all kinds of garbage around your neck or you can bring up something beautiful." It really seems to work that way and is probably a necessary condition, for to gain access to the unconscious, one must still the critical conscious faculty.

Active use of the imagination in picture making (as well as viewing) seems to foster contact with the unconscious. The contents of the unconscious are archetypal and as such cannot be experienced directly. The contents can be experienced only in terms of visual symbols. As Carl Jung said, "The last great adventure left for mankind is the exploration of our own unconscious."
 
I rejoice in that exploration!

What I have attempted to achieve in these photographs of oaks is a synthesis that melds the natural beauty of the oak landscape of my neighboring hills with the more subtle expressive possibilities that exist in those landscapes.  My intention is to engage the viewer in a “Visual Dialogue” with the print that may act as a catalyst for the imagination.

The oaks and their surrounding landscapes lend themselves to a variety of interpretations primarily because of their evocative forms that change with the seasons. The winter ground fog helps to simplify the forms and adds a feeling of mystery and melancholy to the images.

I have gradually come to the conclusion, after 40 years of photography, that the strongest images are those that have multiple layers of meaning and are thus open to a variety of interpretations. I am passionate about combining feeling and form in equal measure and am compelled to explore the energy that seems to exist between what is represented and what is implied in the photograph.

I do agree with Aaron Siskind that “The emphasis in photography has shifted from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean.”