I use photography to explore my interest in the underworld of the psyche.

This is the dreamlike, half-awake, half-asleep realm, where sex, death and spirituality mingle. Part of this realm is what Carl Jung called The Shadow, a place in the unconscious where our secret obsessions and our shame lurk. It is a hiding place for the parts of ourselves that we would seldom be willing to expose. But this inner world also contains high magical and transcendent places. The parts of ourselves that are too sublime, or too shameful, for us to admit exist together in this underworld. The art that I am interested in is full of dark eroticism and is skin to the visions of mystics.

	It is an old idea that the experience of art is similar to spiritual experience. Tenth century Indian aesthetician, Abhinavagupta, for example, said that the taste of rasa is of the same nature as the taste of Brahma. Rasa is the "flavor" of aesthetic experience and Brahma is the divine or transcendent aspect of the universe.
	Sexuality shares, along with art and mysticism, this altered mode of experience. There are very old traditions which connect spirituality and sexuality: great systems like Tantra, Taoism and Alchemy have used erotic experience as a metaphor for the sublime.

But the other pole of sexuality is the body, where the life force, on a cellular, hormonal level, deliciously and powerfully pushes us into erotic behavior.

Sexuality, from the physical to the transcendent, is like a great tide which sweeps back and forth through the underworld of the psyche.

The images in my photographs almost always involve nude bodies juxtaposed with objects or other bodies. It is the relationship between these bodies and objects, however, that is always more important than the things themselves. And the relationship is most interesting to me when it involves elements from the dark underworld.

There is a beautiful tension which arises from juxtaposing something lethal with something erotic or vulnerable, for example, or something spiritual with something that might be considered shameful.

By making the shift into the world of the photograph, it becomes possible to experience these paradoxical juxtapositions in a way that our conscious rational minds would not normally allow.

	If art were to have a function, it would perhaps be precisely this: to confront us with the inhabitants of our inner shadow world, and to momentarily give us the experience of having our secret obsessions coexist with our divinity. Although art may do this for us, art has no responsibility to achieve such a state in us. Art is just magically there.
	When I was a small boy, I remember trying to scare myself by making faces in a mirror in darkened room. But no matter how fiendish the faces, it never quite worked. I always recognized a hint of myself behind the faces. But something else happened instead. After a while I would make a shift into the world of the mirror, and I would hang there transfixed in the tension between the ghostly face and the serene familiarity behind the eyes. It was like a peaceful nightmare.

I think I may still be playing the same game, but using my photographs in place of the mirror.