From 'Pastoral'. Weekly summer travels between New York City and the Poconos revealed various fascinating landscapes as I tried to avoid traffic and explored alternate routes via back roads of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. I’m consciously collecting images. Each image tends to tell a different story, yet they are all connected by being fragments of a larger picture that I am trying to form. A picture of rural North America that I’m discovering at lower speeds and off the beaten paths. I’m acquiring a memory I never had. I arrived in New York City at the age of 24 and spent the next twenty some years in it, developing a nostalgia not for the country I left, but for the America I have never experienced. And now, armed with a Hasselblad 500CM that requires a tripod, I am slowing down to match the images that somehow were stuck in my head all this time. Probably all the movies I have seen, possibly some books and of course photographs of others, all that visual information requiring a proof, a validation, not to match it exactly, but rather to form a new trace of a memory of a place that I have never experienced before...