Geoffrey Ansel Agrons
In her polemic On Photography, Susan Sontag argued that the proliferation of images in the modern era fostered a passive “chronic voyeuristic relation” to the world around us. As a diagnostic radiologist, I spent my workdays interpreting “photographs” of the human interior. Each study was approached as a puzzle with a potential solution, and each analysis was a quest for certainty. Through concise language in a written report, I sought to minimize ambiguity. The images were presumed to hold meaning for the patient and their physician, and often that meaning resulted in intervention on the patient’s behalf. In this narrow sense, at least, Sontag was wrong.
In time I came to recognize that an unspoken aesthetic appreciation of diagnostic images was deeply entwined with the rigor of anatomic analysis, logic, and problem solving. But I grew interested in a different relationship with photography, one that separated an immediate 
emotional response from vigilant interpretation. I acquired a camera and began to explore the world beyond the darkened radiology reading room. The still camera became my modality of choice for effective diagnostic imaging. In the process, I found respite in feeling rather than thinking.
The uneasy coexistence between human populations and the natural world interests me as a photographer. I am intrigued by transition and impermanence, and favor material that leaves an inchoate emotional residue-that haunting suspicion that we may have forgotten something important in our inattention to the sensual realm. I suppose most of my photographs are mementos mori (although I’ve come to think of them as melancholigraphs).
I concentrate on black and white work. I have been very pleased with the ethereal look of monochrome archival ink jet prints made using Bizan, a traditional Japanese Washi individually handmade at the Awagami mill in Tokushima. The paper is made from environmentally friendly Kozo (mulberry) and Hemp fibers, yielding naturally deckled edges and a unique texture. If you would like to purchase a signed and numbered print (limited to an edition of 25), please contact me by email at [email protected] (or select “Get a Quote” while viewing an image) for options and pricing.
Some images may be appropriate for hand-made palladium contact prints. This process, sometimes referred to as platinum or platinum-palladium printing, yields a soft ethereal image with a wide tonal range in the highlights. Because pure platinum or palladium metal precipitates within the substance of the paper, the prints are truly archival.
