For me, still life photography is the most challenging photography, it calls upon the photographer to see the world clearly and in a different way. For still life photography, the light is uncompromising, it must work. We must create our own stage, and take a chance on issues that speak to the world around us, that touch us in a particular way. My windowsills have become important, they are stages to me, and Maria is always curating them, arranging them in ways that speak to me. The rest is up to me, the afternoon light, my sense of composition, the clarity of my lens. Today, there was a yellow pot filled with wildflowers I saw her picking this morning in the pasture. I would never have seen them or noticed them, yet they seemed to graceful and genuine when I saw them here, and so they became a still life.

I never arrange these photos or clean the windows or dust the sills, for the same reason I don’t clean up all of my typos. What you see is real, as authentic as it can be.