Originally from Alabama, I developed a cross-cultural perspective from a career in international development. Ranging from the disappearing old South, to the populist spirit of D.C.’s storefront churches, the vibrant street life of Naples, solemn cremations on the banks of the Bagmati, etc., my subjects are eclectic. They reveal themselves in a more or less documentary style, though I truck with irony, draw out people, and seek integrity in a confused array. I love a crowded and vivid frame and believe a good photo is exponentially more significant than its mere representational process should permit.
Using deliberate 4X5 view camera studies early on and now prolific hand-held photography, I have traveled widely and keenly. I am frankly in love with the world and all its elements, no matter how humble, and do my part to add value to it. I seek, as James Agee wrote of Walker Evans, “the peculiar kinds of poetic vitality which blaze in every real thing.” My photos both ground me and raise me up. They teach me to see better—with or without a camera.
I believe I have discovered, through photography, my superpower: a resonant form of seeing that is both seeking and finding. Rather than create art from scratch, I study my surroundings and grasp at the value offered by ordinary people, scenes, and artifacts of life. Simeone Weil reminds us, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” Through a lens I find moments of clarity and epiphany. I see something worthy before me, something that plugs me into the universe in an intimate, piercing way, something that needs to be scrutinized and organized into a photo. I thus capture a moment and add to my—and I hope your—stock of available reality.
My photos are in the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. I have had four one-person and 26 juried shows in the U.S. and internationally. I taught photography at the Torpedo Factory Arts Center and Mount Vernon College.