About

Photographers are often the last people who should talk about their work. All the verbiage in the world will not save a bad photograph, and a good one will speak for itself. What matters is what a photograph says about the world. But far too often, artists become distracted by what they wish to say about themselves, which is not the same thing at all. For this reason, I will happily excuse anyone who wishes to skip what I have written here to look at the photos instead.

For those who would like something more, all I can say is that in taking photographs I try to capture the extraordinary aspects of ordinary life. From the side of a barn to a small-town street scene to a few square feet of sand on a beach, much that seems finite reflects the infinite, if we take the time to look. Profound things hide beneath the most familiar surfaces, and if I can pierce that veil in a photograph, then I have done what I wanted to do.

As for biography, I grew up in Holmes County, Ohio, which is the subject of one of the projects featured on this site. After graduating from Harvard College and Yale Law School, I took up photography (perhaps as an antidote), and I have been photographing seriously for the past ten years.

The photographs on these pages were taken with either a medium-format film camera or a high-resolution digital SLR. A very few were taken on 35mm. My primary camera for many years was an old Mamiya twin-lens reflex, a pleasantly archaic design that required manual focusing, manual exposure control, and even manual shutter cocking. This type of camera does not allow for perspective control, and so many of the architectural photos feature converging vertical lines, which are a consequence of pointing a conventional camera upward at a structure. While this could have been avoided with a view camera (which I now own), for years I could not afford one, and so I simply worked with what I had. A benefit of this, however, is that the converging lines help to create a sense of scale, and thus convey some of the grandeur of these buildings.

All prints are made with pigment-based inks on archival paper. They should last indefinitely under normal display conditions (i.e., under glass and out of direct sunlight). I will replace free of charge any print that fades under these conditions during the lifetime of the original purchaser.

I hope you enjoy what you see here; please check back, as new material is being added frequently.