Photography requires that you look beyond what you see. I have always needed to look at something just a little longer because I suspect there is more there than first meets the eye. There is some facet to the pattern or a tension in the synergy. Photography became the way I practice that curiosity. It is the visual synthesis of understanding.

The first reading is not wrong. It is simply the beginning because the subject is rarely the subject. A fish market can become a portrait of a place. A building can become a conversation about history. A face can reveal as much about the viewer as the person being photographed.

I don't make photographs to tell you what to see. I make them to invite you to stay a little longer and discover what else might be there. Photography, after all, is a conversation. I can say whatever I want, but I cannot control what you hear. What you understand is all I can give.

I return often—to places, to photographs, and to ideas. Attention is a choice made over and over again. Every revisit is another opportunity to notice something that was always there, something that is different, or to realize that I'm the one who has changed. Often, the image itself emerges from the symbiosis of all three.

Categories are arbitrary baskets to contain meaning. Cape Cod. Germany. Portraits. The United States. They are useful ways to organize a website, but the photographs leak. Memory spills into architecture. Personality appears in objects. History hides in ordinary streets. The boundaries are conveniences, not truths.

I photograph not to show you what I saw, but to show you what I saw when I looked. If, when you leave, you begin to notice the overlooked in your own world or find yourself lingering just a little longer before moving on—long enough to really see—then these photographs have done what they were meant to do.