About the Work

Guitar Zoom is an ongoing body of work rooted in close observation, lived experience, and long-term practice.

The work began with concert photography — specifically extreme close-ups of hands and guitars captured in live performance. These images were never about the identity of the musician. At this distance, fame disappears. What remains is use, wear, pressure, motion, and touch.

Rings. Callouses. Sweat. Wood grain. Strings under tension.

These moments are difficult to capture. Out of hundreds of frames, one might hold the precise alignment of focus, motion, and energy needed to feel complete. Over years of photographing local and national blues-rock performances, I accumulated thousands of these images, slowly forming a visual vocabulary centered on the guitar as both object and extension of the body.

Over time, the work moved beyond documentation.

Rather than presenting the photograph as a finished object, I began treating it as a starting point — something to be bent, reduced, dissolved, and re-formed. Each piece exists along a spectrum from realism to abstraction, while remaining anchored to the same core image: hands and guitar.

The process mirrors sound itself.
Vibration becomes signal.
Signal becomes memory.
Memory becomes something less precise, but more enduring.

This progression — from physical instrument to sound, from sound to recollection — is central to the work. What is removed is as important as what remains. Color, edge, clarity, and structure are altered deliberately, but never arbitrarily. The goal is not distortion for its own sake, but transformation that preserves essence.

Alongside the images, I maintain a public studio journal. The journal is not promotional; it functions as a record of process, reflection, and continuity. It documents how individual works relate to one another, how decisions evolve over time, and how the practice sustains itself through repetition, revision, and restraint.

This body of work is for guitar players — and for those who understand devotion to a form.

For the players who spend countless hours practicing, only to discover that mastery recedes as knowledge grows. For the beginner who brushes a hand across the strings and hears sound for the first time. For anyone drawn to objects that carry history through use.

Each piece invites two modes of viewing:
From a distance, the image resolves as form, color, and movement.
Up close, it reveals detail — subtle distortions, traces of motion, remnants of the original photograph.

My hope is that the work is not only seen, but heard.

This is Guitar Zoom.
An ongoing practice.
A visual translation of sound, touch, and time.