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Image making is present in some of my earliest memories. My dad made silent, color 8mm home movies during family vacations and other events as I was growing up. I would spend hours at a time in the basement with the projector re-playing them for friends and myself. My parents purchased for me a 110-pocket camera in my pre-teen years, and the fascination with making images and recording people and places in my everyday life began.
I used a 35mm SLR camera for the first time at age sixteen, in 1979, that my sister allowed me to borrow for a two-week vacation to Hawaii. After that experience — and fifteen rolls of film — I knew intuitively that photography was going to be a large part of my life, but not exactly how. I absolutely loved it.
After obtaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in photography from Wayne State University in 1986, I worked as a freelance camera assistant for five years in commercial photography studios in Detroit, which specialize in automotive catalog and national print-ad imagery. Opportunities to work for commercial photographers in other market areas in the country, for another three years, provided insight into a variety of client bases including annual reports and magazine editorial work. It was all technically intensive, demanding an enormous amount of diverse equipment, yet it was the paramount experience to learn and use advanced photographic technology. I gleaned considerable technical knowledge during this period of my career, which proved to be invaluable during the next several years of my employment at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops.
The Workshops, located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, provides comprehensive one-week courses where participants study with an influential working professional in either traditional photographic or digital imaging technologies. Immersed in this environment since 1991, I learned exponentially about teaching technique and classroom / field session management from several perspectives of the institution's operation. I experienced dramatic career growth and maturity, from participant, to Work/Study, to Course Assistant, to Operations Manager, to Instructor. It was an honor to work with some of the most influential names in the international photographic community, and simultaneously participate in the incredible, historically significant technological acceleration that photography experienced in the 1990's with digital imaging tools and techniques. What was affirmed most during this part of my career journey is that I am passionate about photographic image making, and empathetic to individuals who want to learn more about it and express themselves with it.
My growth in the Photography Department at WCC has been equally intriguing. I have realigned my teaching approach from an intensive one-week workshop format to a fifteen-week semester format, and I have adapted to a new instructional philosophy. Both formats made me aware of the needs of adult learners and how to effectively teach adults, yet WCC magnifies this awareness and places an emphasis on technology. Prior to this, in Santa Fe, my instructional philosophy was a moderate blend of technology with an emphasis on aesthetics, even though the student demographic is the same.
Regardless of the emphasis, I have always enjoyed the hands-on aspect of teaching photography, and the fact that students learn not only from me but from each other. Each student brings their own photographic experience to class and that experience is tapped into simply by having to work together, trying to resolve visual problems. It's a deep learning tool to have students work in groups of three (in the studio) — not alone. This dynamic really enhances retention of the information.
I always encourage students to experience equipment in a tactile way, to get their hands-on it, see how it works, resolve the intimidation of it, take some creative and technical risks, and most importantly, allow themselves to make mistakes. Making mistakes is part of the image making process and the best learning tool students can allow themselves to embrace. Yet I think it's a difficult thing for many of them to accept at first because our society instead demands precision, quick thinking, and correctness. In all my classes, I encourage students to slow down and think, and I make every effort to provide them with a safe working environment to make mistakes. Better to make them here, I feel, than with a client looking over their shoulder.
My 24 year photographic career has spanned various genre, inclusive of social documentary, advertising, and fine-art, and my images speak about lyrical moments found in everyday life, whether in North America or in destinations such as China, Portugal, and Costa Rica. In addition to a few regional advertising assignments around Ann Arbor, my environmental portrait work and photo illustrations have appeared in various editorial publications in the American southwest. I am currently pursuing a Master of Arts degree from Wayne State University, assembling a group of images inspired by the writings of Carl Jung, which has brought about significant change in how and why I make visual constructions — images — as they are inspired by cultural and psychological ideologies.
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