At birth, we become captives of the cultures and societies into which we are born. And, since old enough to form a thought, I have held that, like a prisoner of war, I should be ever on the lookout for routes of escape.

In this spirit, The Search for Truth Mission visually retraces my life’s forays into enemy territory, in the form of notes written in photographic code, summarizing the various states of mind I have inhabited at one time or another on sundry missions of transgression.

In synch with this idea, and as we grapple with the contradictory role that visual language is playing in our society today, The Search for Truth Mission’s images also explore, from an escapees point of view, the shape-shifting no man’s land expanding in between the analog and digital topographies of the twenty-first century.

Academically, one might call these lens-based images photomontages, collages, photo reconstructions, or assemblages, depending on one’s label preference. Specifically, they are the digitally hand-sliced-and-diced residue of 20th century photographs, sourced and reimagined from the permissions free dustbins of the Library of Congress of the United States.