My interest in photography started humbly enough. I was always visually-inclined. Although I liked to read, in grade school I preferred picture books to weightier tomes like Captains Courageous. I took black and white snapshots with my Brownie Cub Scout camera. I still have a couple of albums of my “early work,” and believe me, they aren’t very interesting. In high school I began photographing a bit more earnestly, but looking back on it, nothing really “clicked” other than the shutter.

I became very interested in the history of photography, especially social documentary photography–the Farm Security Administration work from the Great Depression and Lewis Hine, as well as the expeditonary photography of William Henry Jackson and Timothy O’Sullivan. Somewhat by accident, I was hired as the acting photographer for the Minnesota Historical Society for two summers, and was able to travel around the state to photograph various historical sites, and whatever pleased or astonished my eye–the stockyards of So. St. Paul, the huge Northwest Airlines maintenance hangars in Bloomington, and the inmates and cellblocks of the state penitentiary in Stillwater.

The more I looked at the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Garry Winogrand, Jerome Liebling, Danny Lyon, George Tice, Sergio Larrain, and so many others–the less I made photographs myself. Eventually, as I traveled more extensively in the 1990’s, I carried a camera much of the time in my travels around the US, and have also had the good fortune to visit Europe, Mexico, India, Peru, Chile and Cuba.

I have no over-arching philosophy on photography. In my work, “subject matters”. I avoid pre-visualization. I am simply drawn toward unusual people, places, or things. The world is saturated with the quotidian, the monotonous, the homogeneous. I gravitate instead toward subjects I feel are exceptional, that stand out in some way.

Thank you for having a look at some of my favorite photographs.