Madden Studio Blog

Presently, I reside in Eastchester, NY with my wife Leah and my son Eliot.  We recently returned to the New York Metro area after having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for the past three and a half years.

My childhood was spent in rural Connecticut and later in Vermont, where I developed an appreciation for the abundant beauty of nature.  I graduated high school from The Stony Brook School on Long Island, NY, and then was an English Speaking Union Scholar at Worksop College in Nottinghamshire, England, before attending The University of Chicago, where I earned my BA in General Studies in the Humanities.  I received my MPhil in philosophy at the City University of New York and am presently ABD.  For six years, I taught philosophy at Lehman College, in the Bronx, NY.

I am a “self-trained” photographer whose aesthetic sense is the product of a life spent reflecting on nature, literature, art, and philosophy.

About My Work:

The overarching theme of my works is “Wonder Illuminated”.  Aristotle said that philosophy is born of wonder: the same holds true of photography.  My photos are about discovery and exploration, about the layered nature of the human experience, and the inexhaustible intricacy, beauty, and mystery of our world.

Both in Eastern and Western traditions, philosophers investigate how we come to know the world, in what consists that connection between the phenomena and our interpretation and categorization of them.  As an aesthetic medium photography allows one to explore various levels of epistemic engagement, for instance, a move from raw sense data to the delineation of objects and the further acts of interpreting objects relative to human desire and aversion, of forming various emotional and psychological attitudes in response to them.   I enjoy the interplay between the determinate and indeterminate, the structured and the chaotic, the objective and subjective, that is to be found throughout nature.

The illumination of wonder, then, is an invitation to look into the world perhaps a little more deeply, more attentively, more deliberately, and in the process to appreciate not just the world about us, but the awesome beauty of the world within us as well.