a few notes about the photographs:

There is nothing exotic about these images -- or the people in them. They are of ordinary people like you and I. They are doing ordinary things in ordinary places. Wherever in the world you are reading this, you can see your local equivalent by noticing people doing what they do around where you live. We often become sensitized to this so we don't notice -- but we need to.

The point is, photographs like these can be made anywhere. They can be made in the United States, in Spain, in Iceland, in Brazil -- many of these images are just of people working, working with their hands. Where I live, in the north part of Coastal California, working with one's hands is something that just doesn't happen very much. It seems that in this bread basket of technology, mechanization is better. Many people have lost their jobs and livlihoods because they have been found to be less "efficient" than the work that a machine can do. I am not romaticizing a world without machines, it is just an era before my time and I wanted to experience that. This is one of the main differences between much of the work in Indonesia and that of my home. But even this is changing quickly.

I wanted to see this work, this connection between the individual and the product being made. As a traveler, these images are some of my journal entries, windows into my experiences. As a photographer, I set out to communicate these experiences so that other people could better understand them. When both of these things happen together, I hope the viewer experiences something wonderful.

These images are from my first travels in Indonesia from the summer of 2000. The images are all parts of different stories that I hope will continue to unfold with time and let themselves be told. While they are incomplete stories, i see them as something similar to a "house's foundation" for which they can be later built on. I hope I will be able to continue building -- I am already planning my next journey through its islands.

Enjoy!