I remember taking my first photograph, a shaky snap of my mom and dad and brother. The little black box camera was just an idle fascination, but when the tilted image came back from the drugstore I had my first true inkling of the wonder of photography. A few years later a close friend shot a picture of me backlit by the sun. A lucky trick of light produced a circular halo around my grinning, kid-toothed head. This was magic. For days I was enamored with what my friend had wrought. Photography, I realized, had the power to transform. A shy and awkward boy like myself could become an icon of saintliness.
Perhaps it was my high school and college journalism classes that drummed home the concept that photography was a morphing, duplicitous medium. Selecting a front page photograph can be fraught with moral decision and guided by concerns of politics and propaganda. A properly placed image will sway public opinion more assuredly than any number of well-worded editorials. Through journalism I learned that photography has the power to excite, bring tears, offend and outrage. One single image can illuminate or distort; bring quick understanding or mislead. A politician's portrait ennobles or humiliates. A social faux-pas snapped by a fast-fingered paparazzi has the power to change a celebrity's status overnight. Journalism taught me that photography is a two-edged sword disguised as a lance of truth.
But I was too dreamy, unfocused and romantic to ever land a job at a newspaper. I also suffered from an excess of political and moral qualms. I drifted into creative writing, churning out poems and essays and short stories. It was the early 70's, and like thousands of others in my age group I dabbled in philosophy and art, dropped out of school, explored drugs and alcohol, beat poetry and bisexuality. Eventually I found myself working at a low-paying job in the screen printing industry. I was the product of an education in the liberal arts, and also a casualty of rebellious times.
It was around then that I became a sort of hermit. The world was spinning rapidly to new destinations, and somehow I had lost my grasp and been whirled away. I felt myself alone, an eccentric and a misanthrope. I first thought myself an artist the day I scribbled till dawn on a flimsy piece of butcher paper. Soon I was wildly and obsessively making self-absorbed drawings with colored pencils on plywood. For a number of years I did little but drink, draw, and smoke pot, imagining myself destined for some strange, glorious, outsider infamy.
It was the camera that brought me back to reality. It became a tool that reconnected me to the people and places of my existence. I enrolled in the (now defunct) Milwaukee Center for Photography, and enjoyed the tutelage of instructors such as Murray Weiss, Larry Oliverson, and Bill Lemke. The darkroom became a new, healthier, hermitage. The wonders that evolved there drew me again and again to confront the outside. I once again became engaged with the world.
With time I started to travel: Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Europe. It was through the camera that I encountered these places. There were shreds of truth to be sought, but inevitably I twisted those shreds to the demands of my fantasies. Italy and India became favorite haunts. One country seemed exquisitely civilized, the other, seductively, beautifully, primal. Both were full of wonder, chaos, and enlightenment.
At one point I felt the need to continue my education, doing Private Studies at Studio Marangione, The Institute for Contemporary Photography in Florence. An instructor there, Romeo DiLoretto, helped hone my printmaking skills to new levels of richness and subtly.
Photography continues to be my way of truth-seeking, silent poetry, and gentle obfuscation.
Yes, I still imagine a halo shining bright and angelic around my head.
For an artist statement, and information on technique, please click "Some Thoughts on What I Do."