I have always regarded photography as an art form, and black-and-white photography has existed as long as tangible photographs have. Although the art world quickly dismissed ‘pictoralism’ as a valid genre, many would argue that all photography could be seen as a subset of expressionism; even family snapshots. Nevertheless, there is also a substantial amount of serious photographic work done in the abstract realm of surrealism, and that is what interested me. I liked the improvisational aspect to it; notice a surreal scene, grab a camera and capture it; the less preconceived the intent, the better. Grab a camera and walk out into the world, treat the world as a gigantic surrealistic sculpture and capture some surrealistic images.

This series of photographs explores the nature of what I call, for lack of better terms, ‘surrealistic improvisational still-lifes.’ Now I view still-lifes in a sort of “you can tell a lot about a man by the way he arranges the tools in his garage” kind of way, but less organized. I see all the items in a scene that have arrived at different times for different reasons, some of the objects have a lot of intent in their position, and others are there because they were in-the-way somewhere else. Amongst all of this randomness, there is a pattern, and the composition of the frame makes sense of it, even if in a rather absurd fashion. Black-and-white photography is well suited for this kind of work because as it tends to add mood to a scene by removing all traces of color making the onlooker's eye more attracted to the subject. Lines and shapes lead our eyes through a black-and-white scene in ways they do not in a color photograph. If the colors in the scene are turned into shades of gray, from pitch black to brilliant white, other aspects of the image—shape, lighting, contrast, texture, tone—become the dominant elements making the still-lifes' contrasts and juxtapositions even more dramatic.

—Rodney Tuttle