C E Morse (Floatcat)

“Trying to define yourself,’’ Tennessee Williams once said, “is like trying to bite your own teeth.’’

That being said:

My first car was a 1936 Pontiac. I had loved antique cars since I was a boy, telling my father not to sell his 1936 Buick coupe (the Green Lizard), to which he replied: "you won't want that old thing!" Wrong! Thus began a love of old cars and a trips to endless boneyards for parts.

I soon discovered Johnnie Monroe's boneyard in South Thomaston, Maine: over 3000 cars mostly 20's, 30's, 40's & 50's ..... including six 1936 Pontiacs and a 1929 Essex or two (my second car). At first I brought only tools, but soon discovered in all the twisted rusted metal, images that rivaled the best of abstract paintings. I started bringing my 35mm SLR and I was hooked.

I am intrigued by observing the collusion of nature & man as it unknowingly creates incidental, unintentional, accidental images that lay in wait for the moment when I stumble upon them. Finding these images never ceases to amaze and delight me, and I enjoy a perverse amusement that a lot of these compositions are comprised of what you might overlook, what would be deemed ugly: erosion, collision, rust, and rot, yet when presented without identification can be beautiful, seductive, and emotionally evocative.

Random events throughout our lives shape our vision and abstract images can connect with our past, both consciously & subconsciously. Unlike many Photographers who want to influence the viewer with a certain point of view, I prefer to have the first impression of my work unencumbered by the influence of subject recognition to illicit an undistracted subjective reaction based upon the viewer's own personal experience.

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see" ~ Henry David Thoreau"