Pseudologia is a book that was born about 3 years ago, on a day when I was home sick from work with a really bad cold. Laying in bed wasn’t making me feel better, so I proceeded to work in my studio. I drank cup after cup of coffee to try to lift the fog in my head, laying the photos down all over the floor of my apartment. There were too many of them to fit on our big kitchen table. I arranged and re-arranged, photographed the arrangements then arranged again, for 8 hours or so, until I had something I felt good about.
These photographs really did add up to something more together than they did alone. Seeing the story emerge was exciting, I could see areas I needed to fill in by shooting more. The book allowed me to work in new way—instead of chasing perfection I was digging as deep as I could into my singular obsessions, to see how far they would go. Would I get bored? I wondered. The answer was no. After scratching and digging my way into these shapes in hundreds of images, I still wanted to shoot more. And I was finding new ways to do so.
In my working life, I’ve almost always had a full time job. Since my son was 3 years old, I’ve been a solo parent, supporting us both. I usually get a lot of satisfaction out of my day jobs, and sometimes they even inspire me in my studio. However, this means I have to be disciplined about my time, and often means working my butt off in the studio on vacations when other people are on holiday, on weekends, early mornings, evenings, and on sick days.
On that sick day, and on many days afterwards, the book was simply called Book One. I intended to make a series of three slim book that would fit together in a case. However, when I finished Book Two, I started to realize this was really one book, and there was no point in overcomplicating things with an arbitrary set of divisions between the photographs. So Book One and Book Two were re-edited and merged to form one.
The book Pseudologia has been edited and updated since that first day, but the bones of Book One are still there. The themes in my work, which I have been returning to over the years, remain intact.
