Selected Images and Publications (1984-2018)
My first paying job was actually somewhat related to photography. When I turned seven, I began working at the New Yorker Bookshop which was down the block from our apartment on the upper westside of Manhattan. I would arrive at the Bookshop at 4:30am Sunday morning, and begin to assemble the sections of the Sunday New York Times together, so it could be delivered beginning at 7am. I remember looking at the paper’s newsprint photographs, and especially at the images in the Magazine, as I was folding each section into one another.
I had my first photograph published when I was thirteen, and was paid ten dollars for it, an image I took at the Fillmore East of Country Joe and the Fish, for the paperback book, The World of Rock. My first paid assignment was two years later, when I was hired to photograph the still-wet oil paintings of a family friend for an article to be published in the New York Post the next day reviewing his upcoming exhibit.
But even with the rise of my photo career, the truth of the matter was that I never really thought that I could make a living taking photographs. My father was an artist and a teacher and in a way I was being unconsciously groomed to follow in his footsteps. So after college I was off to graduate school at the Rhode Island School of Design (where commercial photography was not taught, let alone discussed or encouraged) to continue my personal work, receive an MFA degree, and to begin a career in teaching photography.
Unable to land a full-time teaching position, it didn’t take me long to realize that I wasn’t going to get very rich seeking just part-time teaching, so I began taking freelance assignments to make ends meet. Eventually I would split my time equally between teaching and commercial photography, and then when the structured times of my classes got in the way of my accepting assignments, I made the shift to all commercial photography, all the time. And I never looked back.
The images and publications that follow are just a tiny sampling from the thousands of commercial jobs that I have shot over the past five decades. Yikes!
(For image data, click thumbnail and hover cursor over enlarged photographs)
