Photography Bio

I was born April 9, 1954 in Portsmouth Virginia, and grew up in nearby Williamsburg, the restored 18th Century capital of Virginia. After two years at the University of Virginia, where I studied urban planning, I transferred to the Maryland Institute, an art school in Baltimore. I then transferred to Cooper Union in New York where I studied with Joel Meyerowitz, one of the pioneers of color photography. Since art school I have worked as an architectural photographer, and I've pursued various landscape/documentary photo projects.

In 1980 I began photographing the Lower East Side of Manhattan in collaboration with fellow Cooper graduate Ed Fausty. We worked for a year documenting the streets and architecture of the neighborhood. The photographs were first exhibited in 1981 at the Henry Street Settlement. The Lower East Side project led to an invitation to photograph the Wall Street area of Manhattan in conjunction with several other photographers. That work was first exhibited at Federal Hall on Wall Street in 1983.

During this time I began making photographs of Central Park on my own and on assignment for the newly formed Central Park Conservancy. My photographs of the park were first exhibited at the Dairy in Central Park. This work led to a project sponsored by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation in which I photographed natural park areas around the city. These areas of wetlands and forest exist in all the boroughs, and are surprisingly expansive. In 1986 I exhibited this work at the Urban Center Gallery in midtown Manhattan, and the show subsequently travelled to other galleries around the city.

In 1985, while still photographing the parks of New York, I turned my attention beyond the confines of the city and began photographing the landscape of the former European East/West border, also known as the Iron Curtain. In making the photographs I travelled the heavily fortified line between the Baltic and Adriatic Seas, as well as the Berlin Wall. This project was first shown at the International Center of Photography in 1987. In late 1989 I returned to Berlin to photograph the wall just after its unexpected opening, and later I photographed the border zone after the wall was removed. Prints from the East/West project have been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art.

Following the completion of the East/West project, I was asked by the Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment to photograph the landscape of Prospect Park, which has resulted in the current "Trail of the Waters" exhibition. The pictures include all four seasons and follow the course of water through the park beginning with its source from a manmade spring to various pools and creeks, and ending in the lake.

For the past several years I have been commuting between the U.S. and the Netherlands. In recent months, I have been photographing the outskirts of Amsterdam exploring the uneasy border between city and countryside. The working title of this project is "Amsterdam on Edge."


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