Artist Statement
When I photograph, it is a journey of discovery. I take my inspiration from what I see and how I feel about the world and the people around me. I find faces, which lead me to questions. I wonder what each face had seen throughout its life, and how it had been transformed by the experiences and emotions of the person behind it. I hope my photographs do more than just show what was in front of me, but that they give you a sense as what it is to be an American in the twenty-first century.
Process Statement
For all of my personal work, I prefer to shoot with 120 film and a basic camera that yields a square image. I prefer the simplicity of the square, finding it's equality on all sides to be well suited to how I see the world. I prefer color, as that is how the world occurs to me. My post production entails scanning the negative and preparing the file to be printed or displayed on-line. I prefer to use the scanner as I would a darkroom, simply, eschewing heroic feats in photoshop.
Since 1979 I have made my living as a photographer. Initially I worked at Tiffany & Co. photographing merchandise for catalogs and advertisements. I left to freelance as an assistant and to do my own shooting for magazines. Between 1983 and 1986 I worked as a newspaper staff photographer, and since then freelancing again for corporate and editorial clients.
I am currently the staff photographer at Montclair State University in Montclair, NJ. I also continue to work for a variety of clients on a freelance basis shooting products, architecture, interiors, portraits, and all types of events.
Throughout my career, I have managed to balance by professional responsibilities to my clients by always being engaged in work that explored by interests and allowed for full personal expression of how I felt about those interests, needing only to satisfy myself in the process.
I was born on Staten Island in New York City. My affinity for the gritty urban industrialized streetscape was cultivated while being raised in Kearny, NJ. Photography discovered me in high school and gave me a means of expressing how I saw the world. After surviving 12 years of Catholic school, I studied photography at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. Despite years of making a living as a commercial photographer, I continue to pick up a camera and make images purely for my own pleasure.
How to use our image viewer
Click on any of the thumbnail images to launch the viewer. You can then navigate forward and backward within the portfolio by clicking the left or right side of the enlarged image. Click the add to collection checkbox to automatically add an image to your collection. Image tags or search engine keywords appear below the collections' checkbox and each word or phrase is a link to potentially more image matches.