Who is Behind the Glass

I grew up in the West. Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota — these aren’t places I discovered; they’re places that made me. The wide skies, the long silences, the way a landscape can hold a whole season of memory in a single frame of light. When I picked up a camera, I wasn’t looking for new subjects. I was learning to look more carefully at the ones that had always been right in front of me.

The name Through Weathered Glass is literal before it’s anything else. I shoot with vintage lenses on modern camera bodies — old glass from another era, paired with today’s technology. There’s a quality to that combination that I keep coming back to: a softness at the edges, a rendering of light that feels less clinical and more felt. It’s a small act of stubbornness, choosing imperfection on purpose. I could just as easily have called this Through Weathered Eyes — because I’m not seeing these places with the wide-open naivety of someone encountering them for the first time. I’m a middle-aged man who has lived alongside these landscapes long enough that what I see is filtered through experience, through history, through time. The glass and the eyes work the same way. Both are better for what they’ve been through.

What I’m really photographing is memory in landscape form. The way a certain hillside in Montana looks exactly as it did when I was twelve. The quality of late-afternoon light over the Badlands that doesn’t care what year it is. I’m not chasing the dramatic or the exotic — I’m after something quieter than that. The sense of a place that has been lived in, returned to, recognized.

A print on a wall is an invitation to stop moving for a moment. That’s what I hope my work does — not just decorate a space, but anchor it. These landscapes meant something before I photographed them. My job was just to stay still long enough to catch that meaning and bring it home..