Over 30 years ago, I began to work with the medium of photography as my main means of expression.  I had studied painting and found that just working with the limitations of pigment did not satisfy my need to tell stories.  Through my investigations in printing and photography a world of mystery and chemical transformation was opened and ever since that time, I transform narrative into light and light into metal.   Most recently, (over the past 8 years) I have photographed the effects of my rapidly changing environment on the indigenous creatures.  I have seen a basically rural area change to suburban very quickly and the road system is my grid to document the changes that create the unnatural habitat.  In addition I have developed a continuing interest with the tradition of Memento Mori and its relation to photography.  I never wander from the grid, much as the ecologist, who must catalogue all species occurring within a constructed grid within any ecosystem.  What I do is show is a vision of transformation through the animals, people and abandoned spaces.  Some of the works may seem confrontational, but I see them as transformational evidence, of human cause and effect.  I depict with the clarity of a crime scene investigator a landscape often outside our narrow field of vision.  In the past year I have images that are combined to create a dreamscape introducing another level of the human condition.  These are places abandoned and yet still present in memory.

--MICHEL DEMANCHE