I was raised twenty miles east of Los Angeles. Significant in my childhood was an introduction to the serious viewing of art which set the seeds for having painterly works dominate my vision even to this day. Attending Stanford University in the late sixties lead me into the tumultuous politics of the times. I graduated with a BA in English Literature which was promptly put to use in factory and community organizing over the next ten years. These years working with materials, especially in the machinist trade wedded me to value process and products. Those experiences echo in the creation of my photographic compositions: working with hard copies, cutting boards, gluing. Eventually, I found my way to New York City where for a decade I taught high school English. In 1992 I moved to Portland and continued as an English teacher in the Portland Public Schools.
I bought my first camera, a Vivitar 110, when I lived in Seattle in the mid-seventies. By then I was twenty-eight years old. Before then, as a political person, I was shy of cameras; too often they were used for identification and arrest, and they also seemed too detached from the reality I was busy trying to change. However, as political activity became more rational and the pace of life slowed, reflective observation gained a place in my life. Somewhere along the line, I became the designated photographer for events and gatherings.
In 1984 I started to create my first panoramic pieces. The first was of the Olympic Mountains taken on a hike. The expanse of nature called for an expansive vision. The idea of panoramas gripped me. In fact, I found that from childhood on, I have always wanted to capture to big picture—from being a point guard on my high school basketball team to embracing Marxism to understand the breadth of society. My first show at Café Torrefazione on NW 23rd Avenue in 2003 was entirely of cut and splice pieces. It wasn’t until a trip to Italy in 2004 that I took the qualitative step to shooting and producing single sequenced panoramas—individual shots presented whole and in sequence. I have found that the result of stringing together images in this manner more closely approximates the experience of the “seeing.”
As of this writing, I have now taken a further step in compositional form by working with multiple sets of sequences. This development follows two paths: one is to force viewers to become more aware of the individual photographs, the other is to create abstractions.
September 2008