Because I’m tall and from Texas, it’s hard for me to make anything short. But I’ll do my best. I was born in Corpus Christi, Texas a few months before the Russians launched Sputnik. I’m the third of four kids: two older sisters and a younger brother. Our father was a mechanical engineer and when I was a kid my mom was a housewife. Their parents came to the United States to escape Czarist pogroms and ended up settling in Texas and in my paternal grandparent’s case, Hobbs, NM. Both grandfathers went back to Europe as Doughboys in the American Expeditionary Force during WWI. MY father served New Caledonia and Guadalcanal during WWII. That is where he caught the photography bug. In her youth, my mother was a “Spinach Duchess” in her hometown of Crystal City, Texas. I cannot fail to mention that at the height of the depression my mother’s father was the driving force behind getting a larger-than-life statue of “Popeye” made and installed in the town center. I digress, but I still love spinach. How did I become a photographer? It started early. My father was an avid amateur photographer and when I was a young kid, a few times a year he’d black out the windows in our kitchen and set up a darkroom and develop film and make prints. I’d stay up with him and help him wash and ferrotype prints until I fell asleep. That’s where I started. One day I was at a friend’s house and on their garage wall his big brother had put up a poster of a group of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang. It did not look like any photograph I remembered seeing. The photograph was by someone named Irving Penn. I kind of fell in love with that portrait then and I still love it. A few weeks later I discovered work by Gordon Parks, Pete Turner, W. Eugene Smith, and Richard Avedon. Photography had started to be interesting. I was 10 years old. In high school, I started photographing concerts and making my own prints and a friend introduced me to Diane Arbus’s Aperture Monograph, we’d smoke a joint and go through that book until it fell apart. At college (The University of Texas) I was lucky enough to meet Garry Winogrand. I ended up in a class for studio photography after the head of UT’s Photojournalism department in Austin decided he didn’t want me in his class. The studio photography classes were way across campus in the art department. After realizing that I really didn’t know anything technical, the instructor told me my assignment for the rest of the semester was to learn how cameras, meters, and lights worked, and to help everyone else get their work done. The next semester he made the Art Department hire me as a paid Teaching Assistant. This caused no end of consternation as I was an undergraduate in the English Department. After I graduated, I decided to try photography for the next year or two as an assistant in Houston. I’m obviously not the smartest bulb in the room because forty years later I am still trying to figure out how this photography thing works. However, it is how I have made my living since 1984. I have had a couple of one-man shows, had work displayed In the US Capitol Rotunda, shot a lot of annual reports, and won a few awards, etc. From August through November 2020 I worked as the primary photographer for an NGO, Core Response, documenting the Covid-19 testing program and affiliated work in the greater Atlanta region. In 2002 I married my wife and we almost immediately moved to Atlanta. We have a daughter I am extremely proud of.
