I moved to Los Angeles in the summer of 1974. I intended to stay for a year, maybe two. I’m still here. My father was career military, so growing up, I lived in Florida, New Mexico, New York, Maryland, Illinois, Georgia, Indiana, California and Kentucky—as well as Panama, France, and Okinawa.
I studied at the University of Maryland, got drafted and spent thirteen months in Vietnam as a medic. Went back to college, then became a photographer at the Washington Post. Dissatisfied with photojournalism and determined to pursue my own interests, I enrolled in the graduate program of the San Francisco Art Institute. After the SFAI, I traveled around Europe, through the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, living in my VW van, observing and photographing an amazing variety of landscapes and cultures. After a year and a half I traded the van for six Turkish carpets in the bazaar in Istanbul.
I continue to photograph the L.A. landscape, one of the most diverse and fascinating I have ever encountered. My images are made with equipment that allows for great detail and minimizes distortion; your experience of looking at one of my photographs should be similar to looking through a window.