May 2014
Artist’s Statement
I enjoy exploring the world by foot, bicycle and car. No road trip is too long if there are opportunities to stop at unusual and visually interesting places along the way.
Although I mostly work in color, I am a big fan of the classical composition styles of the great black-and-white photographers of the middle part of the 20th century, everyone from Walker Evans to Garry Winogrand.
I like to work on a variety of subjects from landscapes to the rural south to city streets. I am especially interested in cultural landscapes where we design and shape the natural world for our own purposes. This has led to ongoing projects to photograph rural cemeteries and people at play in public spaces.
My aspiration, though rarely achieved, is to make photographs that evoke an emotion, tell a story or create a sense of mystery – the things that draw you back for a second, longer look.
Biography
I picked up a Kodak Instamatic at 10 and have been an enthusiast ever since. In the late 70’s, while a student at Brown, I had the good fortune of taking a couple of introductory photography courses at the Rhode Island School of Design. There I learned my way around a black-and-white darkroom. I shot film, black-and-white (Tri-X) and Kodachrome, up until 2006 when I finally was won over to digital, and began to devote significant amounts of my time in 2011. I don’t work in a darkroom any longer, but I still love the final product – a print. We live in a digital world and it opens up so many options, but in the end, for me, the process is not complete until I follow it through all the way to a print. One of my black-and-white prints – Pacific Bound – won first prize in the 2012 Serenbe Photography Center’s first juried show. In the last year I’ve become a more regular participant in the monthly reviews at the Atlanta Photography Group, where there is always an emphasis on the print, in addition to storytelling, style and composition. I’ve lived in Atlanta since 1981, when I ventured south to go to graduate school at Georgia Tech. Of course, I still can’t say I’m a Southerner, but I do consider the South my home now.
