About the holograms

I had read about holograms in Life Magazine when I was a teenager, but it wasn't possible to reproduce them so you could only try to imagine what they must look like. I saw my first hologram when travelling through Europe as a wayward undergraduate. I saw that hologram in the city of Delft in the Netherlands at a Dutch research facility called "TNO." I had gotten into a conversation about holography with two Dutch physicists on a train the month before and one of them left their pipe on the train. I returned the pipe one month later and was rewarded with the opportunity of seeing my first hologram - a laser transmission image of a cup and saucer. The subject certainly wasn't exciting but it didn't matter because the experience was overwhelming - maybe "life-altering" would be a better description.

The thought of making holograms never left me but it wasn't until eight years later, after I received a seed-money research grant at Saint Mary's College, that I actually began to experiment with making holograms. The grant allowed me to attend workshops at Lake Forest College and the School of Holography in Chicago. It is safe to say that I was awestruck by the qualities of the holographic image. Two of the most critical properties of holograms, the ephemeral light based origin of the image and its intrisic interactive nature had been central themes which I had been consistently experimenting with in my photography, drawing and printmaking.

My initial forays into holography were simple extensions of my experiments with lunar dance patterns in photography and printmaking. The results were exciting but the imagery seemed too self-concious and forced. I began to experiment exclusively with transmission holograms after this. I had been working with these images and one day while trimming a piece of film I accidentally cut a favored hologram in half. Upset with my clumsiness I attempted to mend the two parts of the hologram together and discovered in the process the most incredible spatial and temporal disjunctures. It was not long after this that I discovered my affinity for a kind of holographic collage which eventually led to a series of images I entitled "Dream Points" and a much larger scale version of the same concept entitled "Dream Passages."

The holographic Gods have been good to me through the years. The medium is as vital and prophetic today as it was when I first experienced it over thirty years ago. Holography is an exceptionally intransigent medium - but only in so much as we understand so little about it and how to work with it technically. The images of my work on this page offer only the barest glimpse of the new landscape that lies before us.