“The first thing I remember knowing was a lonesome whistle blowing….”
Meryl Haggard Lyric
As a photographer the first thing I remember knowing was a warm breeze across the pre-dawn Mojave Desert. That breeze brought the subtle fragrance of the desert. The landscape was bleak, but there was something more than what my eyes alone could record. There is an essence to the natural world that is rarely captured. It has become my goal to record that essence. To capture more than the physical surface beauty of nature I needed to hear that lonesome whistle blowing.
Lake County, Oregon
I have something more in common with Haggard than hearing a “lonesome whistle”. My family crossed that desert in the Great Depression in search of the promised land. We were “Okies”. My father’s family were sharecroppers in Missouri and Arkansas. My mother’s family owned a small subsistence level farm / ranch in central Texas. They all ended up in the Okie enclave of southern California. Later in life, I would recognize my people in the faces of Dorothea Lange’s subjects. Moving on again, as a teenager I found myself in southern Oregon on the edge of the Cascade mountains and the Oregon High Desert.
Umpqua River, Oregon
I have no idea how I went from being the son of Okies to being a photographer. It was not what was expected of me. In any event, in the summer of 1972 I walked into a pawn shop / tobacco store / newsstand in downtown Klamath Falls Oregon and paid 60 dollars for a used Yashica 35 mm view finder camera. The only instruction I had the first few years was the little manual that came with the camera and those product information sheets that came packed with film. Remember the little aluminum can?
Lake County, Oregon
The mid seventies found me in engineering school and doing three seasons as a firefighter for the US Forest Service. I learned to deeply dislike smokey woods at night. However, the possession I am most proud of in this life is my 1975 “Red Card” qualifying me as a “Level II Fireman”. The late seventies found me, as any good Okie, on the road again first to Texas then eventually back to the Willamette Valley of Oregon.
Newport, Oregon
All the early film has been lost. I am not sure but I don’t think I set the art world on fire. Photography really became a serious pursuit in about 2000 when I began using a Cambo 4x5 view camera. Working with a totally manual camera forced me to hone my technical skills. Ironically trying to get a commercial lab to print transparencies to my standards led to my entrance into the digital world. First Photoshop learned at what was at the time the Portland School of Art and Craft and then the purchase of a first generation Canon DSLR. My photography world evolved rapidly at that point. What you see on this web site is the product of these past twenty years of working in the digital world.
Close Up Abstract
An even faster pace of evolution arrived with the 2020-2021 pandemic. I found myself unable to do much field photography. Unable to travel, I spent most days in a converted garage delving deeply into photoshop and rethinking what it meant to capture the essence of the natural world. The result has been what I call Natural Abstracts. The evolutionary process still continues but I can hear the “lonesome whistle blowing” more clearly every day.
Natural Abstract