Put a camera in my hand and I’ll get lost. Miles and hours disappear across cities, forests, and fields.
Years ago, I earned an MFA in Photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design, where I learned to make images, sequence them, and talk about them without killing them. I explored everything: platinum/palladium, albumen, cyanotypes, collage, color, construction. Art school was serious, absurd, and fun in equal measure.
After that, I worked as a fine (and not-so-fine) art darkroom printer. I liked the dark, the solitude, the smell of fixer. But I learned quickly that trying to make art for money is one of the fastest ways to stop enjoying it. Capitalism has a way of wringing the pleasure out of creative work.
I went on a journey. I moved to Poland, taught English, became a parent, became a professor, earned a PhD, and successfully cosplayed as a social scientist.
On the other side of all that, photography was still stalking me, but everything had changed and I had to learn new tools and technologies from scratch. At the same time, I realized I still knew a lot about techniques that had drifted into obscurity, processes that are suddenly hip again. Teaching my son to develop black-and-white film and watching him delve into film photography has been a great pleasure.
Right now I'm working on a back-log of projects, some nearing completion but most in an intermediary state of unfinished chaos. It's all about the process. As long as I've got a camera in my hand, I'll keep getting lost.