My earliest memories are of sunlight reflecting off the surface of the Lake, the texture of sand, and endless summer days. I was born in the Midwestern U.S. and spent the best parts of my childhood in a cottage on Lake Wawasee, Northern Indiana. It was at the Lake, and along midwestern creeks and forests, where I first learned what the Navajo mean when they say “we walk in beauty”. I have been lucky enough to have spent a good part of my life walking in beauty, and trying to show that beauty to others through my work.
Going to Camp, late 50’s
Mt. Lemmon, AZ, mid 70’s
As a young man I wanted be a doctor, but that went out the window when I took an elective course in photography as a pre-med student. I discovered photography and met my future wife, my two life-long loves, in the same year at the age of 21.
My photographic heroes were the Western landscape photographers: Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. Eliot Porter’s book about Glen Canyon on the Colorado River, “The Place No One Knew”, was a revelation. Having never seen mountains or canyons growing up in the Midwest, I was entranced by the idea of a landscape with few people in it. I wanted to experience wilderness, to walk in one, before they were all gone.
My wife and I found that wilderness in Arizona in the early 70’s. We created a life for ourselves in Tucson; raised two sons and built a house of mud bricks we made ourselves in the backyard. I started a business, began showing my work, and have had much success. There have been grants, shows around the country and even overseas, prints in important collections, a book published, all of that can be found in my resume.
What matters are not awards or accolades, but whether or not I have managed to find the homeland I was seeking when I was in my twenties, and whether I have been able to express it’s beauty to others through my work. A list of shows won’t tell you that, and won’t tell you anything about me.
Self Portrait, Bear Canyon, Mt. Lemmon, AZ 1987
I could tell you more about myself if I told you of my heroes, the people whose lives I admire. They are writers, poets, artists who have put down roots, lived in a place and made their life’s work about that place: Wendell Berry, Robinson Jeffers, Edward Weston, Georgia O’Keefe, Mary Oliver, Barry Lopez, Emmet Gowin, Alan Magee, to name just a few.
My place, my homeland for the past forty years, has been the Sonoran Desert and surrounding regions. I built a house of mud, by hand, because I wanted to learn to talk to the dirt under my feet. It was a labor of love working with local materials, in the same way my art is about working with and living in this place: it’s plants, animals, colors, times of day and night, it’s soul.
Our culture has forgotten how to talk to trees, how to sing to stones and saguaros. I have spent my days listening for these forgotten songs. They are increasingly ones of anguish, of drought, fire, and extinction intertwined with the sounds and images of new life and celebration.
In this pandemic year of 2020, those songs of anguish have become our songs as well. We have been forced to confront both the beauty and the fragility of life. My hope is that this experience awakens us, that it opens our eyes to the radiance around us. The beauty is there, it is up to us to learn to treasure it, to walk with it always.
Self-Portrait, Blacktail Canyon, Mile 120, Grand Canyon, AZ 2014