Biography
Portrait of me by Walker Evans, 1974. Metropolitan Museum of Art
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This was taken by Walker Evans in his living room. Richard Benson took me to meet him because I revered Evans' work, especially his depression era photographs. At this time Evans was in the last year of his life and working almost exclusively with polaroid cameras. After taking this, he wanted to title it and asked me tell him something about myself. I think I just sat there thinking what do I tell Walker Evans about myself that would be of any interest to him, at all. Finally, he said "tell me about your people." So I told him my family, on both sides, arrived in North America in the mid-1600's. In Massachusetts on my father's side and in North Carolina on my mother's. He titled the photo "Old American." I loved it. Still do.
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Self Portrait 1973
8x10 Silver Gelatin Print
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The Lens of Experience
My journey in photography began with the cumbersome, deliberate equipment of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Under a two-year mentorship with the late Richard Benson - the renowned photographer, printmaker, educator, MacArthur Fellow and Yale Dean - I learned that a photograph is more than an image; it is record of things and events in the world. He said, "Go out into the world and find out the world is smarter than you are." Working exclusively with 8x10 and 5x7 wooden large format view cameras, I developed a "slow eye," a discipline of patience required to translate the weight of the world onto B&W prints, working with silver gelatin, palladium and platinum.
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Working With My Hands and Fire
After college feeling a need to connect to my early childhood roots, I moved from Vermont to Maine to homestead. I cut and milled lumber from my land, hand-laid a fieldstone foundation and built a small homestead raising goats and chickens, making cheese and doing my best to live off the land. It was the 1970's. There I became interested in ornamental ironwork and founded Starflower Forge, and spent years translating my eye for design into the physical world. My ironwork was defined by a specific paradox: using heavy, industrial materials to create a sense of lightness and organic movement. I specialized in custom lamps, tables, staircases, and architectural components—including completeing the iconic Stephen King fence in Bangor and work for L.L. Bean. Even then, my metalwork was botanical in nature, seeking to make the iron breathe with the fluidity of living things.
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The Narrative Eye
Eventually, finding work in the forge physically debilitating, I returned to working behind the lens teaching photography, multimedia production and filmmaking at Unity College and working as an independent filmmaker. Founding Crossroads Production Company, I produced short films, educational media, and promotional films for nonprofits. This period included work for The Audubon Expedition Institute traveling to Mexico, the US and Canada, as well as producing a film documenting nursing issues in Micronesia traveling throughout the Pacific from Guam to Polynesia.
When not traveling to far-flung islands my work has largely been rooted in the Maine landscape and its people. In the late 1990s, I lived for a year on a remote island off the coast of Maine, producing the sixty-minute documentary A Year on Roque - a study of life on a small farm island and its' natural cycle - as well as a 60 minute documentary entitled The Art of Walking based on the work by Henry David Thoreau of the same name.
Whether I was teaching photography and filmmaking at Unity College or documenting Maine’s "Back to the Land" movement in the documentary The New People Take Root, which was widely televised on public television, my lens was a tool for recording the vitality of a changing world.
In addition to participating in group and solo shows I was asked participate in the invitational photographic exhibit "The State of the Art" curated by the art critic for the Portland Press Herald.
From Documentation to Allegory
In 2020, following the loss of my wife to breast cancer, I turned my lens toward the botanical world to navigate the landscape of my own grief.
"Transience" is the culmination of this lifelong study of form. These botanical studies are not merely pictures of flowers; they are pictorial allegories for the human experience. By applying the technical precision I honed with view cameras, in the forge, the edit suite, and the darkroom to the "broken" and "withered" forms of nature, I seek to reveal a hidden architecture of beauty. In this series, the heaviness of decay is met with a lightness of spirit—a continuation of the "botanical lightness" I once sought in iron. I aim to show that aging is not a loss of beauty, but a transformation into something more complex and sublime.
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Candlestick. 1988
