BIO
I am a native Texan, living in Houston since 1968. I practiced law here for forty years, retiring in 2008. With a lifelong interest in photography, many years of outdoor vacations in the American west, and a wife who loves to travel, I’ve had the opportunity to take photographs in some beautiful places. In my first year of retirement I became a student of Amy Blakemore at the Glassell School of Art in Houston and have been a fixture in her black and white film photography classes ever since.
I am married to Shirley, a psychotherapist and artist. We have two sons, one since deceased, a daughter-in-law and five grandchildren.
MY WORK
The photographs presented on this website were taken over a period of several decades and represent a variety of subjects. No single statement of artistic vision can cover them all.
For example, in the series “Touch Me” my intent was to photograph common artifacts, plants and animals with such immediacy that the viewer would sense what it feels like to touch them. In my travel photography I try to convey my impression of the character of the locale and how it feels to be there in person. I am currently working on a project to document the Texas gulf coast— from major cities, ports and massive oil refineries to fishing hamlets, beaches and isolated back bays— in black and white silver gelatin photographs and to reproduce them in a book with textual commentary on each photograph. My model for this is A Maritime Album by John Szarkowski and Richard Benson (The Mariners’ Museum and Yale University Press, 1997).
Thus no single artist’s statement can suffice. But I do hope that these photographs, or some of them at least, reflect a certain consistent attitude of heart and mind.
The world’s most famous and beloved photograph is “Earthrise”, taken by astronaut William Anders on Christmas Eve 1968 while he was orbiting the moon in the Apollo 8 spacecraft. In the lower part of the photograph, the moon’s surface is almost featureless, uniformly gray in the glare of the unfiltered sunlight. But above the horizon hangs the sphere of the earth, breathtakingly beautiful, a blue and white jewel suspended alone in the black sky. That photograph can evoke profound emotions in us earthlings. To me it revealed certain constants, unacknowledged until then, of my own inner world—an innate sense of awe and deep gratitude for our lovely planet, for the miracle of life in a harsh universe, and for humanity, our intelligence, creativity and love.
It’s been over fifty years since I first saw “Earthrise”, and my awe and gratitude have only deepened with time. I truly love this good earth and its inhabitants.
Awe, gratitude and love for what I photograph. These three. I hope they show up in my work.
TOOLS
These photographs were taken with a variety of cameras. I bought my first “good camera” about fifty years ago, a Nikkormat, then Nikon’s entry level 35mm camera with interchangeable lenses. That first camera, plus a few lenses, locked me into the Nikon system for life. Today when I travel I usually take a film camera (Nikon F6) and a digital camera (Nikon D850) and use them on alternate days. Both cameras use the same lenses. When traveling light I’ll take a 16-35mm zoom lens and a 28-300mm zoom. If serious photography is in the offing I leave the 28-300mm at home and take the 16-35mm, a 24-70mm and a 80-400mm. If birds or animals are a possibility, I’ll add a 200-500mm.
I don’t use Nikon equipment exclusively. In my hunting and mountain climbing years I needed to minimize weight, so I used a variety of small Pentax, Contax, Fuji, Canon and Leica point-and-shoot cameras, both film and digital. About twenty years ago I started using a Leica M7 film camera for street photography and a larger medium format Hasselblad for much of my film work. Some of my favorite photographs were taken with the Hasselblad in France, California and Oregon. These days, however, when I strap on a pack full of heavy glass my back protests rather rudely, so I only take the Hasselblad when I travel by car.
PANDEMIC POSTSCRIPT
As I write this postscript it is June 2020. We are in our fourth month of the Corona virus pandemic and the third month of staying home under self quarantine. Last week the United States’ death toll from the virus reached 100,000. Tens of millions of jobs have been lost, businesses shuttered, and incomes reduced. Health and economic concerns are dire, foreclosures and evictions are starting to occur. No one knows how this will play out or how long the epidemic will last. The economy is slowly starting to reopen under carefully controlled conditions, but people over 60 years of age are being urged to continue to self quarantine. This week the nation is under siege by demonstrations and riots because of another killing of a black man by a white policeman, an all-too-common occurrence. No doubt some of these deaths are justifiable or at least explainable, but this one appears to be simply a very brutal murder.
In light of all this, when I look back at the photographs posted on this website, all of them taken before the pandemic, and at what I have written about them and about myself, none of it seems at all relevant to our current situation. 2019 and the years before seem innocently naive. We were oblivious, unsuspecting of the hammer blows that were about to befall us in 2020. In fact, to focus on our happier pre-2020 existence seems almost disrespectful of the pain and hardships we are being forced to endure today, with no end in sight.
And yet, I’m seventy seven years old. Whether I die soon or live for a few more years, I will have lived the great majority of my life in the pre-pandemic era. That was my time, and it was a blessed one for me. It made me what I am, and in it was forged the character of our nation which will determine how we deal with the pandemic and with our economic and racial issues. I believe that we are basically a good, fair and resilient people, that we will soon take further steps toward racial and economic justice for all our citizens, that we will either find a vaccine for the virus or learn to live with it wisely, and that we will again, before too very long, know substantial peace and prosperity.
So I have decided to continue as before, dealing with the photographs and describing them as of the time they were taken. I have other galleries to add, some from even earlier years than those currently on the site. I will post them to the website as I am able.