About

My older brother Stephen had a poster of a ten-year-old boy, awkwardly dressed in a soldier’s uniform with an M-16 rifle resting on his lap. The boy was sitting in a grassy field, with rows of headstones stretching across the horizon. A black border framed the grainy black-and-white image, and at the bottom, in bold, white type, was written Corinthians 13:11: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

The year was 1970. I was five.  Five years later, Stephen would be killed in a car accident, but the poster would stay on his bedroom wall for a time before it would be packed up and put away. Sadly, the poster was lost. The memory of my brother — that poster — would endure and seed my love for photography.

In 1973, Franklin Schaffner’s Papillon was in theatres. My parents took me to see it. They were not film buffs, so they selected movies for us to see as a family based on what was popular. The actual particulars of the film’s story may have eluded my eight-year-old mind, but Schaffner’s imagery beguiled my subconscious to mold those moving pictures any way it saw fit. Papillon became the seed from which my passion for film emerged, allowing me to expand on photography’s solitary frame by combining a collection of dissimilar images to create an alternative interpretation of the human experience. Some thirty years later, that poster and Papillon continue to shape my photography and filmmaking, instilling an insatiable desire to explore realities that are hidden deep inside the human condition.

But what is photography and what is film today? The mediums are not so easily defined as they once were, at least from a technological standpoint. However, while the way we create photographs and films today may have changed, and will likely continue to change, their purpose to exhibit views of our common humanity remains steadfast. It is these aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical shifts of ideas and technology that define my own explorations in both mediums, and all art forms for that matter. This site embodies that journey — an attempt to understand ourselves. Don’t anticipate finding the answers, but that’s precisely the point of the journey.

Thank you for looking.

Peace.