In more than twenty five years of making photographs, my work has traced a trajectory from otherworldly landscape photography to modernist abstraction. While the ostensible subjects of my work are largely found in the constructed world and human altered environments, the resulting images present a view that distinctly departs from the subjects' appearance.

When I began photographing New York in the Mid 70's, photography was relegated to photo galleries and the photography wing at MOMA. Urban street photography was in full ascendancy and books showing New York City travelogue-style photographs of the skyline and landmarks abounded. In the footsteps of Walker Evans and Robert Frank, one could find photograph exhibits depicting America's hinterlands and exotic foreign locales. In the art galleries, tableau photography had just begun to emerge with the work of Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons.

I started photographing the landscape closest to my home...The West Side Highway of New York City. I believed that I could make photographs in Manhattan that would represent a kind of exploration. While the notion of exploration suggests visiting distant lands, I questioned how could one make discoveries in this city, a land so constantly photographed that every landmark has long been a photographic cliché? From the outset my imagery began to exploit the expressive potential of color photography. I had seen the striking images of Richard Misrach's Desert Cantos as well as some of Joel Meyerowitz's mixed light photographs from Cape Cod. While the urban landscape that I explored would seem to be totally unlike the sublime landscapes of Misrach or Meyerowitz, natural light, weather, and horizon were common denominators. To my senses, The West Side Highway was a kind of natural preserve. And to my photographic sensibilities, it was a place to explore the nature and potential of color materials. My regular visits to the highway were contemplative and reverential. I found that the same area could reveal new subtleties day after day. Viewing the resulting prints would reveal new discoveries about how color film would react to the mixture of natural and artificial light. These photographs were atmospheric, mysterious and theatrical. They now had more in common with the impressionist New York photographs made by Steichen, Struss, or Coburn than with the works of Walker Evans. My photographs were neither objective nor descriptive; the images were evocative and dramatic. Instead of merely representing a place, my work created a sense of place.

After my explorations of New York were largely completed, I began to explore territories within a day's drive of Manhattan. I brought to these places the same sense of contemplation that characterized my New York work, as well as my practiced facility with color film. I initially made photographs of the industrial ruins of New Jersey and the landscapes found along side the highway and train tracks. In New Jersey, I found large industrial structures which I transformed through photographs into a sculptural form. In other images, excavations and construction sites evoked earthworks and minimalist art installations. The stuff and forms depicted in my work were very reminiscent of the industrial materials used by Smithson, Serra, Long, and Hesse. These artists brought these materials to galleries and museums, and wrought a new manifestation of sculpture. In the case of my work, it is the photograph which sculpturally transforms these materials.

Beyond the New Jersey explorations, I created a body of work concerning Nuclear and Defense Technology. With this work the sculptural elements of my photographs achieve a new monumentality. The starkness of the southwestern landscape and the gigantic proportions of bomb proof bunkers created images akin to found earthworks.

In time I began my own far flung travels. In Thailand and Korea, I turned towards more frequent use of natural light. Significantly, the work I have made on farms has incorporated simple and primitive materials used in agricultural techniques. These elements brought a new lyricism and gave this new work a reference to drawing and objet trouve.

Mark Freedman of ARTNews has written, "Jan Staller can take a stunning photograph of just about anything he aims his camera at." And in The Boston Globe, Mark Feeney observed "...it is Staller's great gift to imbue ostensibly dull subject matter with a ravishing immanence."

The time-honored objective of documentary or straight photography has been to use the camera to witness and make a visual recording of the world. Walker Evans' work can be seen as the apotheosis of documentary photography. Writing about Evans, John Szarkowski characterized his photographs as "...barefaced facts, facts presented with such fastidious reserve that the quality of the picture seemed identical to that of the subject." Photographic equipment and films faithfully describe the world with greater automation and accuracy. I believe it is no longer much of an achievement to make photographs in the manner of Evans. Is this all that we can expect from the medium? The goal is not to just make good likenesses; it is about being able to present a individuated vision. From my first work in the late 1970's, I strove to break away from documentary photography and create imagery transcendent of the apparent. As Barbara Pollack noted in ARTnews "Staller makes familiar scenes look totally strange...the effect is completely disorienting." In The New York Times Margarett Loke observed "Again and again he shows that the trappings of 20th-century life can be as mysterious as the glyphs of giant creatures and geometric patterns left on the desert floor..."