WHO?
I was born 1948 and raised in Marietta Ohio, a rural town on the Ohio River in southeastern Ohio. I couldn’t wait to move away. It was a beautiful environment but had a lousy economy and very little opportunity. I was a terrible student growing up and nearly flunked out at Ohio University as I was just starting the undergrad photo program 1968. The Viet Nam war was raging and I did everything I could to stay out of the draft. I talked my Art 101 teacher into raising my grade so I could stay in the photo/art program. That saved me but near the end of that first year I was asked to drop out of photography as the program was very popular, overcrowded and I was not doing good work. That last quarter I said to hell with it and decided to just make images for me not thinking of “good or bad”. I got all A’s from then on and have worked that way since.
I eventually got my MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago/SAIC 1980 and taught for about 10 years, before going commercial in 1990. I’m now semi-retired living in Baltimore, Maryland and enjoying life.
WHAT?
I started my career shooting with a 4×5 view camera when most students were using a 35mm. And just putting a camera on a tripod has a huge effect on the way one works. It slows the process wayyyy down. It made me think before shooting, which inhibited relying on any spontaneity, and the process was challenging. Shortly after getting my BFA, I felt I needed to work and grow faster and get my camera off the tripod. I bought a medium format camera and never used anything else up to digital cameras.
By the 70s the electronic flash was being used by a number of fine art photographers, i.e. Diane Arbus, Lee Freidlander, Mark Cohen, and that had a great influence on me. Even early photographers such as Weegee and Lewis Hine, who used flash powder and flash bulbs, fascinated me. The light itself was so transforming…the way it brought light out of darkness, or mixed with daylight, or enhanced a subject. Around 1980 the color process became very accessible to artists and many of us moved to color. I continued to play with flash. And with color I found I could now transform an image with both light and color manipulation. I developed my light painting over the next 15 years into the mid 90s which gave me an edge when going commercial. Photoshop had not come out yet so my process got me some very big clients.
My main camera now is a Samsung phone and I sometimes use an app that creates round images made from blending 21 tiles that you make of the subject.
WHERE?
I don’t go looking for photographs. My images seem to come to me. They are a product and celebration of my everyday life. I’m not locked into any subject matter or way of shooting. And most of the time I’m taking an image just to see what it looks like as a photograph.
WHEN?
Anytime I’m excited at what I’m seeing. I try to put 3 things in my images, a brain, an eye, and a heart…in varying amounts. As a side note, in my early days I once asked Frederick Sommer, “What do you do when you get excited by something you’re seeing?” He said, “I have a Martini.”
WHY?
From 1954 to 1968, my third year in college, my education had been based heavily on memorization. Not a whole lot put towards “thinking”. The Viet Nam conflict was raging and no one wanted to fight that pointless war. So there was a lot of pressure to stay in college and by 1968 I almost flunked out trying one boring subject after another. Then I went into the photo program at Ohio University in a long shot I might find “myself” there. That introduction to the medium got me thinking more than usual. And the more I got into photography the more thinking I did. It made me acutely aware of my surroundings and brought me much closer to it. For the first time in my life, I started to develop “an aesthetic”. I was seeing beyond the mundane world as I used to see it. I was excited. And I’ve seen so many beautiful images and incredible work by others that I would have never seen had I not taken that chance in 1968.
