I don't photograph things. I photograph a way of seeing them.

A sense of beauty was instilled in me early — a Kodak Brownie first showed me the world could be held with a single click. Photography became my life's work, in one form or another — but it was not until 2001 that I turned to it as a fine art. By then the way I see had long been set, and set permanently.

I served as a Marine Corps infantryman in Vietnam. After surviving a four-hour firefight, I stepped on a booby trap. In an instant it took my left leg and, for a few minutes, took me out of my body entirely — into a black emptiness holding nothing but a single point of light and one pure harmonic sound. There was no pain, no distraction, no self; only that light, and the pull to reach it. The harder I reached, the further it withdrew — until I realized I was thinking, and thinking brought me back to the mud and the battlefield. Lying there, before I had opened my eyes to see what I'd lost, I made two decisions I have never let go of: that I was alive, and that I would live fully, and disability was not in my vocabulary.

It was the most beautiful thing I have ever witnessed, and I have been chasing light ever since. Not the literal light of that moment — it is gone — but its equivalent, in a reflection, a face, a flower, a street. The more directly I reach for it, the further it retreats, so I keep circling it, one collection at a time.

Because ordinary representation rarely holds that feeling, my work drifts to the fringes of the medium — impressionism, abstraction, pointillism, symmetry. Each collection is built around a single visual framework that asks the same quiet question: How should I interpret this? That question is the point — it turns your attention away from the medium and toward the seeing itself. I know the image I am after before I release the shutter; what I am truly after is the light that reveals it, and the feeling of seeing it clearly.

If this work has a home, it is Equivalence — Stieglitz's Equivalents, carried forward by Minor White — the photograph standing not for the thing it shows but for the beauty each viewer discovers in it.

I don't want you to name what you're looking at. I want you to feel it first.