I grew up during the cold war and McCarthyism in a family that encouraged art and believed that the world needed to be changed.  In the early 1960’s I became an art student at Brooklyn College, and studied painting with Ad Reinhardt and photography with Walter Rosenblum.  In graduate school, as part of my art education program I made metal welded junk sculpture.  I thought of myself as an abstract expressionist.  I wanted to make art like DeKooning, Rauschenburg, and Chamberlain.  Their works were full of directed spontaneity, raw energy, sensuality and gritty vitality that spoke to me of real life. At that time, people around the world were struggling for freedom and independence, and throughout our nation people were marching in the streets for civil rights and peace.  In communities throughout America (and the world) people were standing up for their humanity and dignity and struggling against racism, poverty and exploitation.  As an artist, I needed to find a way to have a direct connection to these social realities. My explorations in paint and steel left me unsatisfied. My paintings and sculptures did not sufficiently express what was in my heart and mind, nor reflect adequately on the world outside. Making photographs was different.  With the camera I was able to immerse myself into people’s quotidian lives and social struggles.  I could abstract, compose, and intensify aspects of often, chaotic, fluid reality within the rectangle of my viewfinder. With the release of my shutter, I might begin to physically create a new consciousness in the world.  In the darkroom, with manipulation, technology, physics and chemistry, I might further intensify and complete the process in the making of a photographic print.  I have sought the visual poetry of human dignity. I have sought a hardscrabble realism, a realism that might project the possibility of a better world.  I was inspired by the many great photographers*, who, over a continuum of almost two centuries, have done that kind of work.  I wanted to be a part of and uniquely contribute to that continuum.

 *Eugene Atget, Lewis Hine, Paul Strand, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, W. Eugene Smith, Roy DeCarava, Helen Levitt , Robert Frank, the Photo League and the FSA (Farm Security Administration) and many others.