"He Knows - Limited Edition of 20" Photograph

Dale was born on Friday the 13th and raised in a home shaped by absence, survival, and the quiet endurance of women. His earliest memories carry the weight of religious devotion, the hush of unanswered prayers, and the ever-present threat of judgment. He believed in angels. He feared hell. Church was both refuge and performance. Certainty was rehearsed. Doubt was forbidden. When the institution began to collapse under its own contradictions, Dale walked away. The symbols did not. They embedded themselves in memory, settled into the body, and refused to loosen their grip.

That fracture between belief and the right to think independently continues to reverberate through his work.

He learned early how to sit with silence. How to read shadows. Photography did not arrive as a pastime or profession, but as a purge. He began by photographing joy. Faces at parties. Fleeting laughter. The images felt decorative. False. It was only when he turned his attention toward isolation, decay, and emotional residue that the work began to speak honestly. What is damaged. What is left behind. What endures quietly. Beneath every image runs a low hum of spiritual unrest, a tension between reverence and refusal that gives the work its pulse.

Dale’s practice centers on subjects suspended in emotional and spiritual unease. Solitary figures. Weathered relics. Bones, crosses, discarded offerings. These elements do not perform. They confess. His images function less as documentation and more as parables. Small, unresolved offerings to what has been lost, buried, or deliberately forgotten. There is a restrained holiness in the way the work holds space for grief, for ambiguity, for the unspeakable. It resists spectacle. It rejects polish. Instead, it insists on proximity to what lingers. Pain. Silence. Persistence.

Working across photography and collage-based media, Dale constructs visual altars to the unseen. Intimate, unsettled spaces where vulnerability, memory, and spiritual dissonance converge. His work does not offer answers. It offers witness. A place to stand inside contradiction. A reckoning with the sacred discomfort of being alive.