People ask about the background of the cloud photography. In the 1980s I had recurrent dreams of unbelievable sky panoramas. Generally, the dreams showed me walking alone. I would look up and see clouds that moved in shifting, paintinglike formations, which I knew could not be real. Like a kaleidoscope of large, intricate scenes, they continued to change – making ever-new pictures. How could this obvious impossibility go unnoticed? I thought in the dreams.
In the early 1990s I began to take cloud photographs. Soon I began to experiment with light. This is an old interest of many creative people, such as Goethe; clouds fascinated the poet Baudelaire. Light is a carrier of electromagnetic energy, a moving particle that has no mass so it cannot stop.
Gradually, I began to study what optics (Carl Bohm, etc.) had to say. I felt that starting at the 4 x 6 snapshots took me back into a trance, as if they held transmissions of an energy state locked in. Developing the film took a special process because normal development erased out the images, keeping the houses and ground.
