I recently rekindled my romance with heavy metal during a three year period where my home and professional lives existed in two separate cities. The weekly three and a half hour drive between the two was torturous. I was divided between two priorities, my career and my relationship. Metal provided refuge for my angst and frustration; it can make time pass for me like no other kind of music.

Through that filter of distress and restlessness, I connected with the North Carolina and Virginia landscape I was passing through. I saw in it an energy similar to my own. Engaging in a longstanding conversation between visual art and music, the photographs in On Longing, Distance and Heavy Metal, represent that energy. Made at dawn and dusk with a large format view camera, the photographs are complex and dissonant, sometimes barren, sometimes lovely, and densely layered like both heavy metal and my internal state. I have drawn upon the history of landscape photography to project my psychological condition onto the natural world. My goal is to evoke in the viewer a response to the work that is equivalent to the response I had to my surroundings.

My favorite metal takes the listener on a journey. The progression of sound is not necessarily predictable, it builds on a solid foundation, and layers instruments, voices and energy. It is complicated, often unbalanced, dense, and shares a story. A dedicated listener is enveloped by the sound, temporarily held inside the tangled web it creates. As I drive through the landscape of Virginia and North Carolina, I look for photographs that will hold the viewer in that same space.