I have enjoyed a lifelong engagement with tools—with the means to fashion materials into imagined end products, to explore the properties of many media (wood, metal, ink on paper, vi- brating strings, silver halide, foodstuffs, and eventually ones and zeroes), and to make and build what my mind could conceive. My skills are mostly self-developed, not usually the product of formal instruction or apprenticeship with masters, and generally the outcome of reading, tinker- ing, mental prototyping and construction, and seat-of-the-pants experimentation.
I can trace the origins of tool fascination to my father’s shop, but also to entanglements with typewriters (beginning with my father’s Royal upright), tape recorders (in 1953 or so I recorded myself reading James Thurber’s The Thirteen Clocks), a long series of cameras, a printing press, a lifetime of kitchen equipment, a vast array of guitars and other stringed instruments, and a suc- cession of ever-more-powerful computers.
The images in this book are mostly the product of one fairly narrow and limited facet of a single vastly more powerful digital tool, the Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), used to copy and transform photographs by flipping and joining into symmetrical composite images.


These entirely imaginary creatures are looking right at you, and inviting you to look back. Attention to bilateral symmetry is pretty much baked into our perceptual apparatus, because of our own right/left symmetry and our binocular visual equipment, and mirroring is a simple transformation that can bring to life beings whose very existence was implied but, until the digital unfolding, unrevealed.

To some eyes this procedure is simply a gimmick, an obvious transformation that adds little or nothing to the content of the seed image. For others, the composite images provide whole new realms for visual exploration and enjoyment of emergent creatures and landscapes and meandering motifs. For me they are graphic palindromes, chiral workings-out of visual ideas nascent within my photographs. 




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