College (1973-1976)
Following my freshman year at the University of New Mexico, I transferred to The Evergreen State College, a recently opened, innovative state school located in Olympia Washington, whose teaching concept was one of interdisciplinary learning.
Although I had been doing photography since I was thirteen, the last time I had picked up my camera or shot any photos was three years earlier when I had made the decision to switch from still photography to filmmaking. The initial classes that I had decided on taking when arriving at Evergreen were Russian literture and boatbuilding, and I was also learning how to play classical flute.
As the first semester of my second Evergreen year was coming to an end, my pal Lee and I dusted off our cameras to wander around town and spend the day shooting photos. We had a total blast and by the end of the day, just like that, I was once again hooked on photography.
For the Christmas holiday, I brought my Nikkormat camera to New York, swapped my 50mm lens for my cousin Dan's 24mm wide angle, and spent my vacation photographing strangers on the street of the city. We developed the film at Dan's apartment and I was excited with the results.
Back at school, I continued photographing strangers, and although I tried, I was unable to duplicate the raw, gritty photos I had taken on the streets of New York City. In the small, friendly town of Olympia, it was harder for me to continue my anonymous fly-on-the-wall NYC approach so I therefore commenced to engage more directly with my subjects. I began to turn away from documenting solely strangers, and started to photograph almost everything I was encountering, including constant self-portraiture, and thus began a visual diary of my everyday life. I moved beyond the concept that a single image can tell the whole story, and started to think in terms of placing multiple images together to form photo essays. I also started to use a small flash unit on top of my camera, allowing me to shoot both in the dark and to use the flash's artificial light in combination with available light to separate foreground from background, and I was also spending an insane amount of time in the darkroom, mesmerized by the many magic moments of discovery to be found there. While printing, I was greatly influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson who did not crop his images, and who used the technique of adding a black border around his images to show exactly what he had captured through the viewfinder, and to define the image’s boundries. The black border is added by exposing a thin edge of light that surrounds the exposed image on the negative, thereby subtly giving the viewer the information that the photograph they are looking at is full frame, and uncropped. To this day I rarely, if ever crop my photographs, and in my humble opinion it is photography as pure as it gets.
Upon graduation, two and a half years after Lee and I dusted off our cameras, I knew I wanted to spend my life doing photography.
(For image data, click thumbnail and hover cursor over enlarged photographs)
