The Photographer

I grew up in Southwestern Idaho, in an extended family of educators, counselors, missionaries, all of them visionaries and idealists. Got a B.A. in Music, which of course launched an illustrious career as inventory manager, product specialist, computer salesman, college recruiter, barista, waiter, fundraising telemarketer, freelance landscaper, pest-control ditch-digger, college recruiter again, photographer’s assistant, copywriter, administrative assistant and carpenter. I’m sure I left out a few, but who’s counting? People who count that many “careers” would end up addicted to painkillers, if they had any money, which they usually don’t.

Most of my portfolio was shot by two cameras: a Rolleiflex Twin Lens Reflex medium-format and a Graflex 4x5 Super D box camera with very old lenses I’ve collected over the years. Though I occasionally make silver prints in the darkroom, I primarily scan and edit my images in PhotoShop. I’ve spent the past few years refining techniques combining some very low-tech, organic processes with the latest digital technology to give you the effects that you see in my images. I never use PhotoShop filters. My techniques involve hours of tonal adjustments, dodging and burning, reduction techniques and color adjustments to the images and hand-made, scanned overlays.

Prints are available by contacting me directly or by visiting www.art.com , where you can also order poster versions of many of these images.

Artists Statement

Solitude is easily found around Boise, Idaho, where I grew up. I learned to love those places, both barren and lush, and I discovered them in myself and learned to listen to them. After a while, however, I found that I was listening to myself. These open places don’t inform, they simply invert awareness. The more we admire the beauty – the vastness, the solitude of nature – the more we see inside ourselves. The un-peopled outdoors hides its true intention; it is the vastest form of imposition, unmeasurable. One could fall into it or out of it and not arrive “in” anything, ever.

So I jumped for dear life into San Francisco, hoping to arrive into…something. This new topography, this rich cityscape, is just as vast, but so much more complex: it informs. One can find participation, dialog. When the hills and valleys writhe and shudder to the beat of a million haves and have-nots, and when the Presidio sky is close enough to taste, when I’m awash in it, I learn about change and intimacy. But surprisingly, the solitude is there. Even in the crush of people and the daily struggle to get its attention, The City can be just as aloof as a summer Idaho sky.

Every one of these images is about change and intimacy, and also love. Love in many forms. A curious love, of knowledge; a nostalgic love; a thirst for intimacy. Nearly every image I’ve taken began with a desire for romance, and I think anyone would agree that they are all romantic – from antique autos, to people of all kinds, forgotten places. I fall in love with them first, then my own process of change and intimacy is set in motion through the photographic process.

I want to take everything I’ve seen and thought and learned and reduce them and relate them and refine them until I have something of meaning, something of use.

Doc, to The Seer
From Sweet Thursday, by John Steinbeck