Standing neatly on edge on two long shelves in our garage are more than 200 Woodstock-era record albums that have
managed to maintain their alphabetized dignity through four decades of boxing, un-boxing and re-shelving. I thought of
them as I was piecing together an account of my path to photography.
As a teen-ager, I spent many long afternoons flipping through my local record store bins, searching for cool album
covers. This inevitably led to the purchase of dozens of records based solely on the cover art, followed by a recurring
scene of buyer’s remorse, in which I was reminded of the well-known fact that cool album covers don’t necessarily
mean cool music inside.
At the time, I thought of this habit as a weird, slightly embarrassing (and expensive) quirk. Today I see it instead as a
clue to my real interests and talents. If I had connected this “quirk” to my childhood penchant for drawing dinosaurs
and cars, or my preference for cinematography over narrative, or my obsession with
compass-and-rule geometry proofs, I might have been able to call it what it really was –
a love of visual art -- and I might have been able to let it lead me. As it was, three
decades passed before I was finally able to see and appreciate this affinity in all of its
guises.
Growing up in Denver, Colorado, my only experience with photography was in front of
the camera, lined up with my brothers and my sister, trying in vain to master the art of
the spontaneous smile for the hundreds of orange-casted Kodak Instamatic snapshots that filled our family photo
albums. It wasn’t until my freshman year at the University of Colorado, when I purchased a Fujica 35mm SLR to use
for my Architecture School class assignments, that I moved behind the camera. Most of my work was in black and
white, with subjects ranging from the documentation of building construction methodology to cataloging of local
architectural styles to assistance with historical preservation projects. Outside of class, I dabbled in some candid work at campus demonstrations (it
was the 60s, after all) and rock concerts. I eventually left my architecture studies for mathematics, but during those years as an architecture student,
as I was teaching myself the rudiments of photography, my aesthetic sense came alive; without really knowing it, I had begun the search for my art.
After graduation my Fujica went on the shelf as one career (swim coaching), graduate school (business), and then a second career (software)
intervened, dotted with moves to Nashville, back to Denver, to Los Angeles, and finally to Seattle. After a twenty-year hiatus, I picked up my Fujica in
1995 to feed a newfound urge to document my life. When the Fujica gave up the ghost, my wife stepped in with a gift of a very nice (and sadly
misunderstood) Contax rangefinder, with which I dutifully continued to fill photo albums with snapshots of our house, our garden, our cats, and our
vacations. The idea of using my camera to make art was not even a passing thought.
Then, in 2003, I purchased my first digital camera, a Canon pocket digicam, to use on a trip to Peru with my veteran-fine-art-photographer uncle Jim.
It was during this trip that the confluence of some spectacular photographic subjects and my relentless quizzing of my uncle about photography
rather suddenly allowed me to distill my penchants and preferences into the clear fact of my affinity for visual art. I knew immediately that this wasn’t
a casual observation, that it was something important about me, and that I could use a camera to explore it.
Today, three cameras and many more lenses later, I feel lucky to be able to participate in the craft, and occasionally the art, of photography.
