In the early 2000s, I started doing digital photography mostly as a way to get source images to digitally manipulate. By the late 2000s, I'd worked my way up from using a point-and-shoot to a mid-range dSLR, put thousands of miles on several vehicles, shot my infamous 10k worst (per Henri), had a few works selected for juried shows, and won a jurist's award for a submission to a locally hosted international show. I sold a few large, gorgeous prints that I was really proud of at Glass Growers Gallery, Erie's then (and still) largest. It felt awesome, at first. But that gallery relationship also lured me into a headspace that more or less completely killed my creative vibe over the next couple years in a way that took a long time to recover from.

Now, don't get me wrong. As I started planning this business, I regularly asked myself "WWDVD? What would Deb Vahanian do?" The owner of Glass Growers at the time, Deb Vahanian, was freaking awesome. Her criticisms were always gentle, accurate, and constructive. She was honest and helpful about what was on-brand and off-brand for her gallery, what she thought she could sell and what she couldn't. The problem was what I did with that information in the moment.

At the time, I was doing primarily three types of photography: landscape, nature, and cemetery. I had access to a friend's vineyards and had already taken several thousand shots there. Likewise, I had shot thousands more frames of waterfalls, streams, trees, flowers, and insects taken while stomping all around western PA. I was still learning a lot of the basics at the time, so maybe 40% of those photos didn't completely suck ass, 20% weren't creatively boring, 3% were good and less than .5% were what I'd call technically excellent. But the point was, a few percent of 'thousands' is still 'dozens' so I had a modest little stack of well-composed, creatively interesting images that I was already selling to draw from. What tripped me up was that last category, the cemetery photos.

The thing is, at the time those cemetery photos were the only ones that I wanted to be making. I'd recently gotten reacquainted with the spiritualist movement the early 20th century, so I was fascinated by both the fraudulent spirit photography and some of the spiritualist symbology in the old cemeteries along the northeast PA and NY lakeshores. Likewise, I'd recently discovered Clarence John Laughlin and was experimenting with sepia and 'platinum print' style post processing and double exposures. I was also a bit obsessed with cemetery statuary, using a CPL filter and color filtered b/w effect to get deep dark skies and bring out these gnarly, creepy patinas on the faces of the statues.

I was having a blast and making a lot of really weird, spooky photos. I loved them then and still do. But they were wayyyyy off-brand for Glass Growers.

The mistake that I made was to stop making the photos I wanted to make, in favor of only the ones that were selling. When my second round of consignments ended, I picked up what hadn't sold from the gallery but didn't consign anything else, because I was second-guessing everything I actually liked. I sold some matted prints at craft shows at a nice profit. But before long I wasn't taking anywhere nearly as many shots, or going on as many shoots. Or getting excited about any of them, even the creatively and technically excellent few. Or trying to sell any of them.

Over the intervening years, I've gotten back to creating the images that I wanted to be making, simply because I enjoyed making them. And that creative drive has returned, so much so that working in that space sounds more appealing than anything else I've ever done as a day job.

This time around, it's the freaks' turn to decide what's on brand. I've heard from both longtime artist friends and many of the larger artists that I follow that it's difficult for even the most talented of them to get their work into galleries because it's 'off-brand' based on subject matter, though they may have thousands or tens of thousands of followers online. And even the most formidable of those talents are getting starvation wages on the big platforms for image sales. Fuck that noise. I want to help make them rich.

When I graduated high school I knew I wanted to open an art gallery, someday. Then life happened. I did a lot of other things and across the intervening years I picked up many of the skills that I was eventually going to need to know in order to run an online (for now) art gallery and studio business. And now it's 'someday'.

So while you will find here a bit of my landscape and nature photography that's 'on-brand', I intend this first and foremost as an overgrown, haunted greenhouse of the weirdest, spookiest shit that the creative cryptids of Appalachia and the Great Lakes region have to offer. I hope you enjoy.