Beginning in 1969 to around 1980, my photographic projects fit into a genre of image making heavily influenced by the documentary tradition. This mode of fine arts photography concentrated on documentation in the journalistic sense of photographing scenes, cultural events and environments one came across by chance or circumstance. The focus was on a balance between the chance encounters of interesting or banal subject matter and its visual orchestration according to a lexicon of formal compositional strategies. The game lay in a contrast between the veracity of the photographic image and the shift in meaning that occurs when the photographer conscientiously explores how real-time and real space are reduced and transformed through the freezing of a moment into a two-dimensional image.

The activity of walking around looking for visually interesting studies and chance events in urban and suburban environments was replaced by visits to construction yards at night, which further shifted the emphasis towards formal resolution of visual elements. 20th Century technical, and evidential photographs that were done for reasons other than aesthetic, were guiding models. The prioritization of the photograph´s formal orchestration over its subject matter addressed the historical and ongoing dialogue between photography and painting, where the gesture based construction process of painting was challenged by the mechanical recording process of the photograph.

From 1974 onwards, I began to explore the balance between order and chaos in visual compositions, a precursor to my later interest in Claude Shannon´s Information Theory. The approach consisted of studying the visual relationship of cluttered, banal and uneventful subject matter (a form of noise) in real space and to orchestrate the subject matter defined by the rectangular frame of the image to achieve a formal balance. The emphasis was on the act of formal structuring and the image´s success resided in the degree of difference between the image´s order in contrast to the subject matter´s chaos. The use of strobe lighting in daylight and darkness, further distanced the photographic image from its original subject matter, which further exaggerated the artifice of the photographic mechanical recording process.