Photography has always been my medium of choice. I use it in diverse ways depending upon the need and intent I have with a particular subject or project. I love to work with traditional silver, color, and alternative chemical processes, although digital is playing a bigger and bigger role with my work-primarily due to convenience and necessity.

Whether I use a camera or some other image-making approach-such as photograms or pinhole images-depends upon the nature of the project I am working with. I began making camera-less images in the early 1970s, when I became disenchanted with the small-camera black-and-white social landscape work that I had been doing and began a series of color photograms. Photograms are generally made in a darkroom directly from the objects themselves and their interaction with the basic elements that make photography possible: light, time, and light-sensitive materials. I think of it as taking Edward Weston's interest in photographing the thing itself to another level, instead of making a camera image of the subject, I made images directly with the subject to capture both its inner and its outer character. I was also able to experiment with the psychological and physical impact of color, which, at that time, was not considered a viable medium for photographic art.

This early camera-camless work opened the door foe me to explore diverse applications of the photographic medium with process dictated by context and concept. Over subsequent decades I have continued to make photograms-images of my son as a baby, of trash collected along roadways in the Laguna Wilderness, of animals killed by motor vehicles, of other photographic artists, to name just a few projects. The work has varied in scale, ranging from inches to many feet depending on the subject matter. Most of it was produced in the darkroom in either black-and-white or color, often involving light painting techniques. In the mid-1980s I began using unexposed black-and-white photographic paper in installations and performances letting it change as it was exposed to light over time.

In 1998 I made my first trip to the Amazon rain forests of Brazil. I wanted to make pictures that celebrated the wonders of nature while drawing attention to the impact of deforestation. With that in mind, I decided to concentrate on the flora itself, since the Amazon is home to the most diverse plant population on our planet and the accelerating loss of it is a global concern. I also decided that unlike camera images, camera-less images would retain the character of the plants while conveying a fossil-like feeling that alluded to the loss occurring in wilderness environments everywhere. Images like this would present the beauty of nature in a somewhat decorative manner-the role to which nature is so often relegated-while preserving the essential rawness that makes nature so compelling to me.

Using methods similar to that of photographic pioneers like Thomas Wedgwood, Anna Atkins, and William Henry Fox Talbot, who made camera-less images of botanical specimens in the early 1800s, I worked outdoors, not in a darkroom, using extended sunlight exposures to create color images of Amazon flora directly on gelatin silver black-and-white photographic paper. An image of this kind is formed by placing the object on the light-sensitive paper, exposing it to light for several hours, and then chemically halting or fixing the image using a traditional fixer without a hardener. The resulting print radiates an array of colors that is surprising in its range. I call these one-of-a-kind photograms Lumen Prints, and I find that they capture the physical essence of the plant specimens and evoke a sense of beauty, loss, and memory.

The Lumen Print process enables me to work directly with nature, on site, using natural process to attain exquisite images from nature. In the Amazon, each day I would go out in a canoe and bring plant specimens back to the boat that served as our base, using the open deck on the bow of the boat to make my Lumen Prints. In the bright equatorial sunlight, I would place sheets of unexposed B/W photo paper on the deck and quickly put the plant specimens on top of it before the paper had a chance to react to the sunlight. Once the specimen was in position, I taped the edges of the paper to the deck to keep it from blowing away. In some cases, with delicate specimens, I put pieces of glass on top of the specimens to make sure they stayed in contact with the photo paper.