The idea of the view as something to be found after the act of searching is the conceptual cornerstone for my project. Italy, the historic home of the "Grand Tour", was the zero-point, photographed while on my Fulbright in 2005-06. While researching imagery at Fratelli Alinari in Florence, the world's oldest archive of Italian photographs dating back to the 19th century, I found a collection of images that were full of contradictions and surprises, fueling the inspiration for my work. I intentionally sought out imagery that had poetic resonance, based on incidental objects or views within the images. Italy has a rich history of accepting the spontaneous to occur within a framework of tradition and time. In it’s evolution, my project has taken into account a favorite idiom of Italo Calvino's, "Festina Lente": to hurry slowly.

The images I made are related in that they form a non-narrative. For me, this work is unequivocally visual poetry. These photographs are recorded vignettes of geography and history (regional and national) from southern Italy, photographs that when seen out of context rely on the viewers sense of imagination. The view of an unfamiliar landscape allows for us to dream and long to see that place, as much today as it did in the late 1800's, relying on imagination to figure out what it is that we are looking at.

Viaggio (Le Viste) accepts the idea that photography can show us things we don't already know, and can still serve us well by bringing views of the unknown to an audience. Ultimately the photographs I made were created from a desire to describe something that is not tangible, a view that can only be discovered through the act of searching: the sense of wonder one feels when seeing the world anew.