I’ve been making photographs since I was four or five years old. I have the first photograph I ever made: it was a black and white image of my mother on the Jersey shore. Since then, I’ve made a lot of images. The purpose of this photoblog is to share some of them in the various portfolios, and to talk about specific ones in the posts.
Throughout my photographic career, I used almost every format camera. One of my favorites was a Diana camera. Diana cameras were cheap toy, plastic cameras that use medium format film. I worked exclusively with them for about a year or so. Aside from producing some images that still pass the test of time, the Diana cameras got me away from a tightly compressed way of seeing. At the time, I wanted to be a large format photographer: instead, I did an about face and I went in a very different direction. Later, when I found myself deeply involved in large format photography, primarily for commercial reasons, my vision was still filtered through my Diana experience. Examples of the Diana work can be seen by navigating to the soft focus tab.
One of the most profound influences upon my photography was the years I spent in the darkroom. Today, there aren’t many people in darkrooms: that’s too bad. I’ve had a bunch of them, from a small storage space in a Parisian parking garage to a state of the art color lab with an 8×10 Durst enlarger and forty-two inch color processor. It’s hard to imagine learning how to see, and how to make images without printing. I, like the rest of the photographic universe, have gone over to digital. I capture digitally, I print digitally, and I sorely miss the quiet dark mysteries of film, paper and chemicals.
