The de Young Museum Project was conceived from a single visit to the museum shortly after it reopened in 2005 after an extensive rebuilding.  During my visit I noticed the lobby space in particular provided a uniquely reflective environment.  At play within the space is a continuous stream of variant lighting conditions that washes through the architectural design to create fascinating shadows and highlights along with a steady stream of inquisitive and curious visitors.  Observing this effect inspired me to embark on a fifty-two week photographic study of the museum’s interior space to capture visitor reflections and architectural detail from the museum’s building materials. Continuous visits created a unique challenge to “see” a repetitive space from a different interpretation week-to-week, month-to-month, season-to-season and year-to-year.  This body-of-work has created more than 51,000 photographs, employing over 2,800 hours, during one-hundred and eight weeks of photographing the de Young’s interior and exterior spaces, resulting in eight sub-collections; Abstracts, Architecture, Black and White, Fractured, Non-Reflective, Photo Anagrams, Reflective, and Window Panes.

The de Young has a distinctly angular and geometric architectural design.  I was struck by how interesting the reflective shapes, distorted colors, varied textures and shadows of people moving about the museum are mirrored on the museum’s building materials. I set out to photograph the museum space one day a week from museum opening until close. The process demanded fresh observations to maintain image variety; otherwise the project would soon become dull and repetitive.  To this end, the project was based on three fundamental variables; my conscious “creative” state when I arrived at the museum, visitor population and mix, and variant lighting / weather conditions throughout the day and seasons.

The images play havoc to visual interpretation because of their intriguing juxtaposition to the living participants. It is this intrigue that has led me to see beyond the public display to capture the mirrored side of reality and thus express an impressionistic existential point-of-view.  Often, the reflective perspective confronts our visual interpretation because the dimensional relationships are at odds with reality and common sense.  Another fascination to the museum space is the mixture of image types; (geometric versus people-in-motion), tone (black and white versus color), and textures (smooth glass sheets versus rock or tile) that intrigue the mind.

And yet another unexpected result from this study is a number of individual photographs are ideally suited for replication to create what I term, “photo anagrams,” that is, using a single image to create artwork through recombination much like a writer would take the characters from a single word, (i.e. anagram), to create multiple words.  This artwork is based on pattern emergence that forms from a single image, (as shot, but replicated and recombined), to understand how variant patterns form from image replication.

The de Young has strict guidelines that limit photography; no flash, video, or tripods, and no visitor obstruction.  All of the images are, “as shot” without manipulation, (including the photo anagram series).

It is my hope that individuals looking at these images see another world at play within the context of a public space, so that they to can see what others see and perhaps they have missed, to become inspired to view the world through a different conscious awareness and to question their biases of observation.  This body-of-work illustrates how the public can themselves become the artwork of others as they arrive to view the art of previous generations.