color play | equine surgery | small animal clinic | botanica | cemeteries | berlin | graffiti | people (mostly) | kentucky | venice | beaux-arts ball | rock that uke | things | 3d stereo | commissions

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Though a dyed-in-the-wool black and white photographer, I am as susceptible as the next person to the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, lure of color. Occasionally, I succumb. I admire color photographers with an unerring sense of the thin line between beauty and kitsch.

Kentucky's famed thoroughbreds, as well as ordinary plugs, occasionally need to see the doctor. They may not appreciate it, but they tend to be in good hands. The series is about the Woodford equine clinic outside of Versailles, Kentucky. I am intrigued by the interaction between humans and animals in an environment that outsiders rarely get to see. It is reassuring to watch caring hands and minds intervene in the lives of suffering animals that do not understand what is happening to them.

Watching highly skilled people at work they enjoy is one of my favorite pastimes. This is about the small animal division of the Woodford clinic, where we bring our ailing dog. I wish human physicians on average had the bedside manners and patience of the veterinarians and technicians at Woodford.

Gardens and Parks, where they succeed, strike a delicate balance between the forces of cultivation and nature. The balance is easily upset. Too heavy on cultivation, and all charm and surprise atrophy; too loose with nature, and the focus is lost. The photographs, some of them anyway, try to catch of glimpse of the fleeting equilibrium between the two forces.

Places of loss and aching beauty.

Übergänge/Transitions. This collection is a small extract from an extended study of the city's changing urban landscape a dozen years after the disassembly of the wall. It searches out the less prominent, more idiocyncratic locations that are at least as telling about the city as are the grander tourist destinations. If a famous monument makes an appearance, then it does so in an unfamiliar role or an unfamiliar state. Many of the images speak, sometimes obliquely, about history, inertia, and change. They give glimpses into spaces in between one destination and the next. The work was done during a 16 months stay in 2003 and 2004.

Urban surfaces have, for some time now, exerted an irresistible pull on the errant can of spray paint, much as street trees and fire hydrants attract the strolling dog. The spraying tends to serve the same purpose in either case: to broadcast a territorial claim to the other sprayers on the block. Occasionally, a piece of graffiti transcends this game of claim and counter-claim and touches the passerby who neither knows the rules of the game nor has any stake in it. The best of these pieces are works of art. They come to inhabit and, thereby, transform and enliven their settings. Their faces become focal points of the landscape, familiar strangers that one day will be missed. The photographs in this collection were taken in the spring of 2004 in the alleys of Montréal, Canada.

Friends, family, and acquaintances.

This collection features mostly images from my forays into the Bluegrass region beyond Lexington's suburban belt. The occasion for the outings may have been an idle afternoon or an auspicious look of the sky, and the destination was usually left up to chance and whim. Most of the images are from the mid to late 1990s. Since then, suburban sprawl has destroyed much of the region's charm. If I could still drag myself out there, I would return with very sad or angry photos. The ravaging of the land has earned the region the grim distinction of an entry into the 2006 World Monuments Fund list of 100 Most Endangered Sites worldwide.

The loot from a two-week stay in March 2002, all shot with a Leica M6. I had planned on using my 4x5" camera, but a massive light leak in the brand-new wide angle bellows got in the way. Bad luck, it seemed, until it became clear that the light 35mm gear allowed me to explore much more of the city than I could have otherwise (even though the tripod I lugged around was still the heavy one from the 4x5" outfit). Jet-lag helped me get up and out long before dawn and have La Serenissima to myself.

The images are from the 2001 and 2002 Beaux-Arts Balls in Lexington, Kentucky, organized by Tiffany Broyles, Ben Eilerman, and their fellow students at the University of Kentucky's School of Architecture. The ball is an annual charitable event. In recent years, it has taken place in the underground parking garage of the downtown Radisson Plaza Hotel. My camera was set up next to the trash bins in a cavernous loading dock. The subjects, about one hundred of them over the course of an evening, posed between a wall of light in front of them and a barren concrete wall at their backs, in plain view of the crowds milling by. Deafening rock music reduced communication to vague gesturing; it was freezing cold. Considering this rather less than cozy setting, the subjects showed tremendous poise. Thanks to everyone who participated.

Images from the making of the documentary film "Rock that Uke", a genuine piece of Americana directed by William Robertson and Sean Anderson.

A motley collection of objects and patterns, the sort of thing I bring home these days instead of the bird feathers, pebbles, and lizards of my boyhood. The photos are easier to keep. The medical models and the bird in the cloche are in a small but wonderful collection of teaching models at Transylvania University that dates from Transy's days as the premier medical school west of the Appalachians in the 1830s and 40s. The cloche was used to demonstrate the effect of a vacuum on live birds.

My interest in stereo photography was kindled by an exhibition of Carleton Watkins's splendid 19th century landscapes at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Beside sublime contact prints from mammoth-plate negatives, the show featured a great many more conventional but lively stereo views. I decided that I would try to bring large-format quality to the stereo experience. I ended up shooting two 4x5" cameras on remote controls and displayed the image pairs as large prints in mirror displays where they can be appreciated without the help of goggles or other paraphernalia. During the spring and summer of 2002, I roamed Switzerland in search of its engineering marvels set in dramatic mountain scenery. Some of the results were for an exhibition on Swiss engineering at the Princeton University Art Museum and elsewhere. The majority, however, have not been shown because the displays are so large and expensive. What's on the web so far is material from the pilot project. One day I'll get around to putting up the real stuff. You can find information on the principles of 3D imaging here.

Most of my commissioned work is about architecture and engineering. I like to work with a minimum amount of overhead (such as props or lighting equipment) because this gives me greater freedom to experiment with framing and to respond to the ever changing natural light. Ideally, the results are less predictable and therefore more exciting than those of a more tightly orchestrated architectural shoot, and the approach is more productive and cost effective. I also accept portrait commissions. You find examples scattered throughout the people gallery. Please email me for a fee schedule and an estimate.