Artist's Statement
I’ve been making pictures all my life—drawings, paintings, photographs. During the mid-sixties along with my study of drawing and painting, I began to experiment with photography.
By the mid-seventies I had worked for numerous commercial clients and learned the workings of cameras and lenses as well as studio and location lighting. I formed a company and—with my work in photography, design, research, teaching and the rest—I became extremely busy.
For most of my professional life when a gap in my bill-paying work appeared I would grab a camera and fool around—just shoot for no particular reason and with nothing more than an interest in anything within view. This coupled with a love of travel resulted in 1000’s of images that have taken residence in various boxes, files and hard drives in my studio. I never looked at them or printed them—much less exhibited them. There wasn’t time.
But there was a bigger issue. It seemed the photographic film-based medium just wasn’t up to the task of fully realizing what I saw each time I pressed the shutter. No matter the film emulsion, paper surface, lighting or traditional post-processing effect I used—the pictures often fell short.
This wasn’t the same as even the most complex commercial photo illustration—challenging but comparatively easy. For my personal work, I wanted to create a more complete proof of the way the world appeared each time I took a picture.
To my eye, this required adjustments to the pictures that simply couldn’t be done—in any practical way—with conventional enlargers, traditional masking and photo-chemistry. So I kept shooting and adding the film to the pile.
By the mid-eighties I had begun to use computer graphics experimentally, for design and later in my commercial shoots. I owe a great deal to my clients who sharpened my skills both as a photographer and a photo-retoucher by throwing no limit of impossible demands at me.
This kept me constantly looking for better and faster methods to make photographic images that would meet or exceed my client’s goals. Being effective required constant upgrading, training and re-training—much of which centered on various computer graphic programs. My artistic and professional lives became an experiment as the photographic medium itself had changed—finally enabling my work.