For most of my adult life I’ve taken pictures. It was a way of collecting things that stopped me in my tracks. Almost thirty years ago, I was diagnosed with a genetic eye disease. Faced with the progressive tunneling of my vision, as well as reduced color perception and night blindness, I went to the Southwest United States to experience its vast panoramas before my visual field was drastically narrowed. The trip awakened an interest in photographing landscapes, and following that new road, I discovered that for me, searching for the right place with the right light was almost as good as finding it. That is when I started making pictures and became a photographer.
The series, Comforts of Home, came about as I found connections between my early, quickly-taken photographs of oddities and ironic juxtapositions and the slower, contemplative landscape work that followed. I realized that I could go beyond merely taking photographs as a way of editing and refining my vision of the world.
These are figments of a world that isn’t as real as it looks at first glance. In Comforts of Home, I re-examine and reorganize my photographic life, creating pictures that question comfortable reality.
Allen Bryan
