Growing up, it seemed after having lost utility, novelty or both, every family-owned camera eventually found its way into my hands. The Eastman Kodak Brownie we had no film for, my mom’s Duaflex III, her Instamatic, my sister’s Polaroid, each feeding a growing curiosity in me for how aperture and shutter work together to render light on film. This purely mechanical concern continued at age twelve, with my first 35mm SLR, an East German-made Praktica LTL I carried through high school, used to photograph family, friends and sports for the local newspaper. Eventually I favored most the high school yearbook staff Pentax K-1000.
Photography school in the early 1980s, at what is now Hawkeye Community College in Waterloo, Iowa, brought with it a raft of professional equipment. I got good with a Nikon F2a Photomic 35mm, a Hasselblad 500 C/M medium format, a Super Cambo SC-2 large format and all the lens and lighting gear imaginable. Before graduating, I was named among one of the “Top Five Student Photographers” by the Professional Photographers of Iowa. I was feeling ready to jump into a career. Then, something happened to change all that.
It did not happen overnight, but in the second year of photography school, the oncoming digital revolution was already becoming evident. It was the first time I heard some variation on the phrase, “…in the future, everyone will have a camera in their pocket.” I interpreted it to mean, professional photography, as we had been educated, and as we knew it, would soon be obsolete.
Long story short, with an Associates in Applied Arts – Photography in hand, and hedging my bets, I transferred to the University of Northern Iowa, in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Graduation came three years later, in 1985 with a B.A. in Individual Studies. I quickly moved to California, hocked my camera gear to pay rent one month, and spent the next, almost forty years, working in the technology business. I never looked back.
Today, everyone does indeed have a camera in their pocket, and professional photography, although not obsolete, looks very different. And, I have grown too. I find myself, now a twenty-plus year Oregon transplant, and once more, a photographer, as well as aspiring writer and spoken word artist. I have matured my perspective behind the camera, from that of a craftsman, to that of an interpreter. At last, I know, it is not about the camera.
With my work, I want to capture the experience of the ethereal, that time and place all of us occasionally in life encounter a fleeting sense of something larger than ourselves. In a moment of solitude, or in a certain place, or even in the midst of chaos, perhaps there is a notion of something light in the air, something near celestial looms. It might produce a feeling of deep emotion, or a clarity of thought?
For me, there is a sense of having brushed with something unknowable, more than my existence, a profound instance of intimacy between myself and my surroundings. There is a beauty in acknowledging the larger entropy at play in this place, the impermanence of all this reality I mean. In the visual, a palpable vulnerability exposes itself in a rarity of combined light, line, texture and pattern. All comes into focus momentarily, and then gone.
Mine is not so much a story of capturing perfection in any medium or subject matter, as it is about fusing meaning with found scenes in the everyday, probing the seemingly random assemblage of beauty there, and distilling out an abstraction. I lean toward introversion and introspection by nature, so I suppose my work at its root reflects that cerebral ethos. I want an opportunity at openness and surrender, to see and feel, to wonder, and perhaps capture a glimpse at manifest ethereality.