About Me

The essential spirit of my photography grows out of a love of my subject. Most of the subject matter you'll see here deals with the city of Los Angeles. I grew up in Chicago, and L.A. is a pretty different place. What struck me when I got here was the degree to which the people who live here put it down.

John Szarkowski, the legendary former director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, once wrote about "Mirrors and Windows" as philosophical tendencies in photography. The "Mirror" is the photographer creating images as a reflection of himself -- a mode of self-expression. The "Window" involves the photographer using his craft as a method of exploration; by creating images, he comes to know more about the world than he did before (and so does his audience, by extension).

Szarkowski did not consider these ideas to be mutually exclusive, and I consider my photography to be a hybrid of these philosophies. I have come to know Los Angeles much more intimately through the photographic exploration I have done -- the "Window," if you will. And I create these images, in part, to prove to myself and to anyone else viewing them that Los Angeles is a worthwhile place of beauty, color and intimacy. This is the "Mirror" part, in which I not only want to document a location or a pattern or a series of colors. I wish to convey as much as possible the way I feel when I see certain things.

My work leans very much to the architectural realm, although many of my images also include everyday objects and moments of happenstance. All are beautiful in their own way.

Photographers whose I work I consider to be major influences on me are Saul Leiter and Stephen Shore, for their color work that elevates the mundane and shows it as beautiful. Edward Weston's desert textures and shadows, and Julius Shulman's careful renderings of Los Angeles architecture have also left an indelible impression on me. Perhaps the most important influence on me in the last three years has been John Humble, whose Los Angeles photography shows that L.A. has a thousand faces just waiting for their close-ups.

Thanks for visiting my website. Don't miss my blog, and feel free to contact me if you have any questions or comments.