My interest in photography began in junior high school. A friend of mine got a basic film processing darkroom kit as a gift, and he invited me to join him. I borrowed my dad’s camera, and we set off on bikes to find things to photograph.

 

As lovely and imposing as the front of the Masonic lodge was, the debris and decay at the back of the building were more interesting and evocative to me.

 

As kids do, my friend and I traded a lot of things back and forth. At some point, he traded his unused darkroom kit to me, but I didn’t do anything with it. Later, I traded it back to him. That was when he set it up in his parents’ coat closet and asked me to try it out with him.

 

The darkroom kit had a tank for developing a roll of black-and-white 35mm film and a little box with a light bulb in it for making contact prints. Contact prints are made by placing the negative in contact with the printing paper and exposing it to light. The printed image is the same size as the negative, so my first photo was only the size of a single 35mm frame. Still, this tiny image was powerful.

 

Untrained both technically and visually, I already wanted to look at the things passed by, overlooked, and hidden. Those things appealed to me far more than the calculated façades presented to us. Photography was immediately compelling to me.

 

I was captivated by these captured moments in time that were rich with detail and meaning, and that could reveal more, the more we studied them.

 

I also understood that photography was a representation of reality and not reality itself. From that point on, little else interested me.

 

Yes, I did all the regular stuff: I photographed for the school newspaper and yearbook, photographed my friends and family. I experimented with bizarre combinations of lenses and adapters to see what could be done with photography.

 

After high school, I studied photography professionally at Brooks Institute. After a stint in the army, I studied photography as a fine art at the University of Oregon.

 

Photography is a wonderful life. There are so many kinds. I’ve had the opportunity to photograph college sporting events; celebrities and politicians (both the famous and the infamous); biomedical subjects for research and instruction; food for menu displays; architecture; weddings; and people, communities, and events for feature stories. The variety that photography encompasses helps keep it fresh, as well as the continual technological innovations that have sprung up since my humble beginnings in the 1960s.