I have been taking photographs since High School, but my memory of cameras and pictures goes back even further. In my elementary school days, I was the family "little scientist," and since my father was the boss at an Uranium extraction plant, I was able to tour his workplace with some special privileges. In the laboratory I was fascinated by technicians as they made their U-308 assays, and on weekends my father and I would go prospecting. Father let me carry the rock hammer and hand lens while he waved his Geiger Counter over rocks as we looked for Uranium deposits. He began to bring me discarded lab equipment and paraphernalia from the plant, and these treasures were more valuable to me than any toy car he could ever give me. At Christmas I spurned the baseball bat and glove for the chemistry set and toy microscope. Of course, in the 1950's, toy kits contained items that would be banned as too dangerous in the risk-averse society of today, and with supplements from Dad's laboratory, I was soon cooking up all sorts of noxious messes, but nobody really complained about the little prodigy's experiments.
Rifling around in household storage closets, I found the old family camera that no longer worked, and pestered mother until she let me keep it for my own. Of course, she knew I would dismantle it trying to determine how it worked. The folding bellows fascinated me as it precisely collapsed and erected so predictably. But the way the lens inverted the image onto a sheet of waxed paper placed at the film plane was pure magic. Optics preoccupied my attention and drew me into the world of the miniature. In my need to see things ever smaller, I eventually cannibalized the camera lens and turned it into a compound hand lens which I still use almost every day. In the evenings I turned my lens to my various collections: fossils, spiders, butterflies, stamps.
My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic that was everywhere in the early 1960's. I turned its surprisingly good lens on high school events, my new environs in South Texas, and eventually, undergraduate life at at Texas Tech. It was still the only camera I had after I married and went to Puerto Rico in 1973. When we began to skin dive on the coral reefs, I found a water-tight box for underwater photography, and I snapped away at the amazing diversity. I didn't think of myself as a photographer then, but I tried to take pictures that were well-composed and interesting. I bought books and worked on exercises to improve my images, an when we moved back to Texas we bought a Nikon camera. Then picture taking became more technical, but my identification was as a scientist, not an artist. My pictures were intended to provide information, even if they passed artistic criteria as effective images.
In about 1985 after I graduated with a master's degree in Biology, I took Leisure Learning classes in nature photography, macro-photography close ups, and darkroom, but photography was still more of a hobby than anything. Photography became a passion only after I took early retirement and began to take classes at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts Glassell School. There I finally enrolled in a semester-long class in darkroom techniques under Duncan Ganley from Edinburgh. Eventually I took classes from all members of the photography faculty, Fraser Stables, Amy Blakemore, and Will Michels, After a few years I no longer blushed when I said, "I am an artist."
Photography is all about light and shadow for me. I count among my many influences, in particular the canvases of Yves Tanguy and the literary tone of Junichiro Tanizaki. This pairing will seem bizarre to anyone familiar with both, but the bringing together of opposites is essential to my aesthetic persona. I do not have a single monolithic style in photography, I am interested in too many distinct aspects of the art to focus on a single approach. Among my current projects:
Rifling around in household storage closets, I found the old family camera that no longer worked, and pestered mother until she let me keep it for my own. Of course, she knew I would dismantle it trying to determine how it worked. The folding bellows fascinated me as it precisely collapsed and erected so predictably. But the way the lens inverted the image onto a sheet of waxed paper placed at the film plane was pure magic. Optics preoccupied my attention and drew me into the world of the miniature. In my need to see things ever smaller, I eventually cannibalized the camera lens and turned it into a compound hand lens which I still use almost every day. In the evenings I turned my lens to my various collections: fossils, spiders, butterflies, stamps.
My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic that was everywhere in the early 1960's. I turned its surprisingly good lens on high school events, my new environs in South Texas, and eventually, undergraduate life at at Texas Tech. It was still the only camera I had after I married and went to Puerto Rico in 1973. When we began to skin dive on the coral reefs, I found a water-tight box for underwater photography, and I snapped away at the amazing diversity. I didn't think of myself as a photographer then, but I tried to take pictures that were well-composed and interesting. I bought books and worked on exercises to improve my images, an when we moved back to Texas we bought a Nikon camera. Then picture taking became more technical, but my identification was as a scientist, not an artist. My pictures were intended to provide information, even if they passed artistic criteria as effective images.
In about 1985 after I graduated with a master's degree in Biology, I took Leisure Learning classes in nature photography, macro-photography close ups, and darkroom, but photography was still more of a hobby than anything. Photography became a passion only after I took early retirement and began to take classes at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts Glassell School. There I finally enrolled in a semester-long class in darkroom techniques under Duncan Ganley from Edinburgh. Eventually I took classes from all members of the photography faculty, Fraser Stables, Amy Blakemore, and Will Michels, After a few years I no longer blushed when I said, "I am an artist."
Photography is all about light and shadow for me. I count among my many influences, in particular the canvases of Yves Tanguy and the literary tone of Junichiro Tanizaki. This pairing will seem bizarre to anyone familiar with both, but the bringing together of opposites is essential to my aesthetic persona. I do not have a single monolithic style in photography, I am interested in too many distinct aspects of the art to focus on a single approach. Among my current projects:
- "Flat Studies" - I reduce reality to a single plane lifted from the world like a skin and placed onto paper where they can be investigated at leisure.
- Houston Time Portal - Postcards from the 1910's from downtown Houston paired with rephotograped images from the exact same point of view.
- "Frozen in Glass" - Contemporary prints in alternative processes from old glass negatives.
- Escape from Wilshire Village - The last days of the apartment complex at Dunlavy and W. Alabama where I lived for 25 years.
