A family friend gave me my first camera in 1972 – an Exacta TTL; it was a beautiful pre-digital camera that was able to capture the decisive moments I so admired. During my 40-year career as an artist, educator and professional photographer, I have used a wide variety of photographic equipment to translate a three-dimensional world onto flat surfaces. These range from a cumbersome 8 x10 field camera to my present-day infatuation with the portability and accessibility of the iPhone.

I titled this exhibition Harvest for the simple reason of reaping the rewards of my life spent being an artist and educator. My early influences came from my drawing instructor at Ohio Wesleyan who taught me how to keenly observe light and shadow. At the same time, a course in existentialism in which I was discovering the work of Nietzsche, Kafka and Kierkegaard helped me to solidify photography as a tool to ask questions and make meaning.  Over the years I have drawn inspiration from the atmospheric painting of Turner, the Dutch Masters and the Hudson River painters. Inspired by the photographs of Stieglitz and Steichen – my photographic prints made in the mediums of collotype and platinum/palladium processes exhibit my love of the richness of black embedded in the fibers of paper.

Light is my primary subject. Light can give or reveal meaning. Attention to light and dark, pattern and repetition work in dialogue with each other in my photographs to reveal planar surfaces. While formalism is important in my early work, the use of metaphor has driven image making in my most recent work. Deluged by the emotional roller coaster of aging parents and the realization of my own mortality, I’ve returned to Turner and his nautical themes. My most recent series Deluge is an attempt to embrace my engagement with this mortal coil.  I believe in photography- photography as art, photography as story, photography as communication and photography as therapy. My work has evolved from light and dark to light in dark. Like a friend, I turn to photography as a means of comfort.