I have tried in vain to understand exactly why I photograph. My speculation has produced many possible contributing factors: I sat too close to the television (three feet) for too long as a kid; I don’t want present moments to be forgotten; my favorite uncle Marvin forgot my birthday at eight, or whatever. It does not really matter! Long ago, I simply accepted the reality that I am here to make photographs and discover meaning, to learn about myself in order to more fully experience life. That’s a lot, and following are parts of my story that I know influence how my photographs look.

     I know that my perception of color was somehow altered when I was nearly killed by electrocution at age ten. I accidentally touched a 220-volt electric wire on our family farm. I experienced a violent shaking and visualized jagged, saturated color shapes in a state of altered consciousness. I have been attracted to saturated colors ever since!

     A powerful and mysterious energizing “pull” transformed me from the very first days I began using a camera fifty years ago. I left graduate school three credits short of a master’s degree in psychology, surrendering to that force pulling me to deeper experiences of physical and metaphorical vision. Photographing released a fresh, strong expressive energy, having grown up in a stoic atmosphere of emotional invalidation.

     Fortunate to be alive, and gratitude for my recovery from addiction and alcoholism, around the time I started photographing, stimulates my celebratory and combinatory play, making pictures with a camera—a consistent joyful exploration of the basic elements of the medium: forms, lines, especially color and spaces; the viewing point—where I stand; and the moment and framing. 

    Photographing outside in the street, open air spaces is my natural inclination, because I experienced vast open spaces driving trucks, tractors, and large machinery on my parents’ Iowa farm as a youth. Academic studies in the social sciences drives my unending curiosity about the human currents that manifest in our social landscape, how it is "painted and put together".

     I have exhibited throughout the United States. My photographs have appeared in hard copy and online publications in France, Great Britain, Czech Republic, Italy, Russia, and USA. The widely popular Lens-Culture blog and website chose my AMERICOLOR portfolio as a favorite. The photographic history book by Joel Meyerowitz and Colin Westerbeck, Bystander, A History of Street Photography, prominently includes some of my pictures. My photographs are in several public and many private collections.

     I have completed grant funded art projects: Downtown Madison (Wisconsin) and Our Land, Our Lives, about the 1980's family farm crisis in the Midwest. I am in the fifth year of my self-assigned interpretive documentary entitled, On The Tamiami Trail - US Highway 41, Tampa to Miami. It's the first road for automobiles through the Florida Everglades, completed in 1928, the highway that has massively impacted Florida’s economy and culture with a substantial environmental legacy.

     I share the record of my experiences, my photographs, with the hope that they are of as much benefit to you as they are to me.