I grew up in a house with a darkroom where my father printed black and white photographs of his six young children. He pinned the prints up on cork boards all over the house and framed one of each of us to line the stairs. I would gaze into these images each night as I dragged my sleepy head up to bed. By the time I reached high school I was shooting and printing my own photographs. When the rest of my household went to bed, I turned on the amber lights and worked late night hours in the darkroom.
When my grandfather died my mother gave me his collection of Leica cameras, and in college the Leica became my trusted friend. Upon graduating I was awarded a Watson Fellowship for my proposal to study medicinal plants in the Andes and Himalayas. I settled in a remote village in the high Andes of Peru for a year and then lived in Kathmandu where I studied Ayurveda with a local botanist and park ranger.
Living in South America and then Asia changed my life and the photographs that I took in my journeys convinced me to pursue photography full time. I moved to San Francisco in 1986 and set up a darkroom. I returned to Peru in 1987 with a Hasselblad and the prints I made were shown at the Michael Shapiro Gallery in 1989.
The following year my Peru portfolio was awarded a Maine Photographic Workshops Work Grant which enabled me to return to Asia to photograph in Nepal, India, and China. I had my first solo show in NY in 1996 at the Yancey Richardson Gallery, and my photographs were printed and reviewed in the New Yorker magazine and the New York Times.
In 2007 my work shifted when I spent a sabbatical year in Italy where I studied bookbinding with an old master named Omero Benvenuti. After my return, I set up a bookbinding shop and photography studio in San Francisco where I continue to make photographic prints, Florentine marbled papers, tooled leather journals, and photography books.