About half way through my life (how does one calculate this fraction?), I determined that I wanted to have THREE 25-year professional careers in life. I had achieved the first and was well into my second, and you are seeing the third! Practically no photographic artist in the world actually earns a living wage with his/her art, so we’ll see if it is actually a “career” by that definition.
In 1970 I had just started graduate school in Chemistry, and had fallen in love with photography and graphic arts – and I had to make a decision to stay in school or explore art. I spent a year studying with the great New Yorker cartoonist, Edward Koren, and was swaying for some time. Better wisdom prevailed and I stayed in chemistry, while considering photography as an Avocation for many years. I always loved chemistry, in fact I have loved every day of every career I have had – does that make me the luckiest man on earth? Or does it paint me as particularly determined not to waste a moment of this precious life? I have been in love with another human being (OK – NOT always the same one) for the vast majority of my life on earth too – does this make me the luckiest man on earth, or just not very selective?! OR … observant?
I DID put together a one-man show in New York City in 1975, and also attended the landmark photographic workshop of all time, at the opening of the Center for Creative Photography, in Tucson, Arizona. Our teachers were Ansel Adams, Minor White, Frederick Sommer, Robert Heinikin, Judy Dater, Richard Misrach and others! Ansel Adams spent an entire afternoon in the darkroom showing how to print one of MY negatives – Mission and Wired Window, Tucson, 1975. This workshop is when I discovered the wonderful truth – NO, NOT the horrible or awful truth! I was at the same stage in my scientific career as many of the younger photographers – Misrach, Dater, Heinikin …. THEY were looking for inspiration for their next artistic exploration, EXACTLY as I was looking for inspiration for my next scientific exploration! We were going through precisely the SAME thing. When it comes to INSPIRATION and CREATIVITY, no field is any different from any other field. I learned my creativity in Chemistry and Photography at the same time.
In any event – I stayed in chemistry through graduate school, and post graduate school, (did hang my art in a few places now and again), and then starting teaching chemistry at a local campus in Orange County – UCI – and THEN moved back East to do MORE chemistry, this time in an applied research laboratory. Yeah – I just LOVED everything about chemistry – but then a time came when I had SEEN as much as I needed to. I KNEW that I was NOT in line for the Nobel prize – so maybe there is something else out there that will turn me on. I was married at the time and had a two-year-old, so a life of artistic poverty still wasn’t in the cards – so my wife left chemistry and went to medical school and I left chemistry and went to dental school.
Now, at least, I could teach again, which has always been a great passion, work in a very detailed way with my hands, have MANY new toys to play with, AND I could work with WAY more interesting people than I usually met in the lab! Enter second 25-year career. While I did practice for five years and taught for eight in a dental school, it is the creation of an independent teaching institution that fulfilled my creative needs for many years. Everything you teach, especially to international students as I have, only works when you bring a spirit of creativity into it. There is always an ART to how you present ANY subject so that it resonates with the student – just as you want to resonate with a viewer of your wall art. In reality, teaching is PERFORMANCE ART – you need to get through to the core of your audience in a pretty profound way in order for them to appreciate what it is that you have to say.
So – during this next period of teaching – I have also been able to fan the flames of my photographic art. I got seriously back into it again in 2001 and have been working diligently ever since. I made the transition from negative printing in the darkroom, to scanning my negatives into a computer and editing them on a monitor and printing them with Pigment Inks. Leaving the darkroom behind was difficult – but I still develop negatives myself in a really dark room, but do not print them with an enlarger. My enthusiasm for this started after a couple of experiments – I edited and printed the Mission and Wired Window image and compared it with the print, which I still have, that Ansel Adams did in 1975 from the same negative. The digital print is MUCH better! AND, of course, in this day and age you have to have a digital version of all of your work anyway.
I have been making the next transition, from film to digital cameras during the last several years. I had to find a camera that accepted a lens that would allow the kind of image control that I get with my view cameras (the black cloth cameras, where the lenses tilt in all kinds of ways…). A few of the images shown on this site have been taken with digital capture, but the vast majority are 4 x 5 or 8 x 10 film exposures that were scanned into the computer. BUT – the future is upon us and the technological advances are here to stay, and film is disappearing off the shelves!
Now – in the darkening, waning days of my life …. Kidding! Now – I have reached the 25-year point in my dental teaching career and an old, continuous love can at last take the forefront of my life. And I again find myself in love with another human being. Always observant …