Photography has been an important part of my life as far back as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories of taking photographs while growing up in Tucson involve a pinhole camera that I made by taping a 35mm film box to one of those old 126 film cartridges used in the early Kodak Instamatic cameras, and I still have negatives of photos that I must have shot – judging by the subject matter – when I was around eight to ten years old.
In high school I got my first “serious” interchangeable lens SLR camera – an Olympus OM-1N – which went with me everywhere and served me well for about fifteen years. Looking back, it’s easy to see how I was known by my friends as the “camera guy” and often asked to take photos for special occasions.
As looked back on my growing body of work I began to understand that photographing people was about capturing moments in time, that the photographs that I took were a record of that specific moment – an instant that would and could never happen again. And that made each photograph special.
Every photographer captures moments in time, certainly. But I’ve learned that if I can draw the person I’m photographing into the camera, if I can establish a connection that ends up making it into the final print, then I’ve not only captured a moment, but created the beginnings of a story. Then, it’s simply up to the viewer as to what that story may be.
I want to connect the person I’m photographing to the people who will eventually see the photograph. I want draw the viewer into the image and hold them there for a moment; if I can do that, then I’ve made a step toward succeeding with what I set out to do. And ultimately, what I set out to do is to create an image that will be as powerful, as evocative, as beautiful tomorrow, as it is today.