I love classic movies. And that has helped me appreciate the unique qualities of photography as an art form. What I value most about “still” photography is its lack of movement. If a great cinema experience flows with a rhythm and tempo, a photo might achieve greatness by combining its inherent quality of stillness with an equally strong compositional and tonal balance.

Or put another way, a photographer might strive to hold all the competing elements together in a kind of stasis or equilibrium. I like to think of it as a decisive stillness, as opposed to a decisive moment.

For this project, I chose images that appear to freeze spatial and tonal relationships at a picture-perfect juncture. A slight realignment of the objects to the left or right, or a perceptible shift in the shadows, and the tentative balance disappears. Once that balance disappears, reality moves on in its search for the next steady state, when all the elements unaccountably merge into place.

This approach might seem to hark back to the aesthetic principles of Alfred Stieglitz or Eugène Atget. In a sense we’ve come full circle, when we mix our contemporary techniques and sensibilities with century-old aesthetic principles and print processes.