For whatever reason, my going on 50 year immersion in photography seems to have always involved a search. I believe it was the photographer Ralph Gibson who asserted he was only as good as his next photograph and I think that notion has informed both my photography and my teaching.

Since my early obsession with image making in the early 1970s, I have laid in bed at night and imagined new and future images. Influence is tricky and really involves everything that our brains have absorbed and stored from the people we’ve met to the books we’ve read to the art and films we’ve seen to chance encounters in nature or flea markets and everything in between. But a couple of things stand out. I was accepted into a graduate program without an undergraduate art degree and was surprised to learn I essentially had to make up this deficiency by studying art history and taking courses in drawing and painting. It was all new to me and I became enthralled with Modernism and the immediacy of drawing and how direct personal input (mark making) had everything to do with outcome.

From Modernism, I gained an appreciation for the notion of the new- that a work of art is a unique encounter, the meaning of which is found primarily within its borders; and drawing, I believe, gave me permission to directly interfere with the purity of the photographic process. What followed were decades of experimentation and curiosity about the nature of images and perception that involved activities from drawing on photographs with light to making constructions whose purpose was to be photographed to altering landscapes in Photoshop. My intellectual cover in doing this was to explore the nature of the relationship of photography to reality and I believe my work exists as a tug of war between fact and fiction. As previously mentioned, most of my photographs incorporate recycled materials and I have become fairly adept at looking at an object or even a landscape and imaging it as a character in one of my images.