"Miami #1" was shot at the NADA Art Fair during Art Basel Miami Beach. I got down to table-level and took photographs under and of the "still life" before me in the booth of a cutting-edge German gallery. The still life was a readymade, made up of the found objects that the gallery was presenting: gorgeous clear and colored transparent acrylic sculptures.

"Float #1" and "Float #2" are photographs of pansies in Provincetown. Despite this unintended irony this work is not about social commentary. It is a result of an ongoing experiment with the landscape in photography and how abstract it can become.

In this case two similar images of flowers that were shot very close up through to the distant sky were spliced together. It's one of the first times I am satisfied with the results gotten from montaging imagery. I really love these photographs and the questions they raises among viewers.

My concerns in abstract painting — layering, complex space, architectural shape, movement, minimalist color and form — get folded in with the batter of experience as I work in the relatively spontaneous media of digital photography.

During recent years I took photographs of the same liquid-light, quiet landscape that indirectly inspired my painting in and near Provincetown in the 90s. I have an ongoing interest in minimalist and field painting and I graft it onto the larger canvas of the landscape. My gaze often crops out people and takes refuge in rich, graphic slices of the outdoors. While these photographs are not peopled, they are personal, mini-views of places I adore.

The subject matter in my recent photographs is sometimes acrobatically taken from details in the interiors of museums and art fairs and landscapes of Miami, Boston, Chicago, New York, California, and Provincetown. Most of these unretouched photographs were shot with a Nikon D70s DSLR using equal parts spontaneity, experimentation, and intention.

Copyright © 2007 John Ruggieri. All rights reserved.