Photography, 2004-2014 (and ongoing)

I was trained as a photographer in art school. At any given moment, I will suddenly have the urge to capture an image. These images speak to an ongoing interest in light – particularly the golden hour, twilight or light in the darkness; what is made a landscape by imposing a frame, windows, lenses and/or screens; a sense that the political or historical is happening right now; or simply the passing of time as evidenced by material culture. A friend who teaches photography calls this method “point and grunt,” but also praised the ability to “throw a frame around something.” There is a magical moment – perhaps what Henri Cartier Bresson meant by “the decisive moment” – in which intuition, a visual attraction, internal emotions and simmering ideas map onto the outside world as a crystallized image.

Art critic Carly Berwick on Drive-In, Massena, NY

Stevens’ photographs are found landscapes, reminiscent of William Eggleston’s color-saturated photographs of American vernacular scenes. Drive-in was taken in upstate New York, near the town Massena, on the border with Canada. Its seeming casualness belies the deep formalism of the image, with its repeating rectangles in the marquee, screen, and numbered posts. The sun-streaked outdoor cinema references vacation postcards yet replaces crowds and vibrancy with a sense of absence and decay. The leftover landscape becomes an accidental collage.