My father was a formidable art educator. My intellectual and loving mother died when I was ten years old. My father’s father was a conductor for the Union Pacific railroad; he was good with tools and my grandmother was a wonderful cook. I am a part of all of them as well as others that I never really knew. Growing up, we moved to a number of different cities in the US which may have contributed to not getting glasses until I was fourteen, when living in New Haven. I had to look at things very closely, to perceive clarity in the surrounding soft fog. Photography has been an extension of that experience. I get to look long and hard at things from the beginning when I take a picture, until the end when I print it. With color and digital printing tools I can see even more than when I began as a teenager making black and white photographs.

In college, one of my teachers was Harry Callahan, a great photographer as well as a very kind and perceptive man. Drinking with some students one night, he told me that if I ever got over the death of my mother I could start making good photographs. I stopped photographing for twenty years when we were raising our children in New York, but I have been working at it again for the last ten years or so. I have been mostly photographing water, deserts and plants. People often seem to respond to the photographs that have an emptiness in them; an emotional “hole”. I have been happy and productive in my adult life but the kid with the paper route and no glasses and no mother still comes through.