(Polaroid Self-Portrait, Portland, Oregon, 2009.)
People often use words like "sad" and "lonely" to describe my images. I spent my teens in a small Iowa town where I was an outsider by definition, and that had a huge impact on how I see the world. Part of me participates and another part observes, whether I'm looking through a viewfinder or not.
As a child film cameras were toys for me. I spent time playing with our family's Brownie Holiday Flash and our Polaroid SX-70. I began shooting black and white film for my high school newspaper, using a manual 35mm camera. On one assignment I met a photographer shooting for the UPI wire service, who gave me the best advice I've ever gotten about photography. "You can never have too much film," he said. "If you think you've brought enough, you haven't." It was liberating for me to hear that even a professional shooting for one of the biggest news organizations in the country took bad photos, and lots of them. He shot with a motorized winder.
I continued to take pictures on and off over the years, mainly with a manual Nikon, but my real love of the art came back to life when I picked up a Holga in 2007. I was researching buying my first DSLR at the time, and was having trouble choosing between the Canon and Nikon models in my price range. Somehow while Googling I stumbled across this article from Apogee Magazine describing the Holga, which was exactly the opposite of what I had been looking for: a medium format film camera with a lens made of plastic that costs about $35. The images in the article blew me away. They were moody and evocative in a way I hadn't seen in photos from a digital camera. I ordered my first Holga soon after and made my entry into the world of medium format film photography.
Since then I've come to love shooting on medium format film, especially black and white, and I've managed to put off buying a DSLR. I still use Holgas, but I'm more likely now to shoot with my Hasselblad. I also shoot with Polaroids -- my favorite is an SX-70 Sonar from the 1970s, like the one I played with as a child.
If you would like to license or purchase one of my images, please contact me.
Group Exhibitions
Newspace Center for Photography, 1st Annual Members' Showcase: A Juried Exhibition, Portland, Oregon (upcoming)
Photoworks San Francisco, Toy Cameras, San Francisco, California (2009)
Photoworks San Francisco, Polaroid Show, San Francisco, California (2009)
Education
Workshops and classes at Newspace Center for Photography in Portland, Oregon, including: Black and White Darkroom with Laura Valenti, Platinum/Palldium Printing with Ray Bidegain, Shooting From the Heart with Joel Preston Smith and Lauren Henkin, Holga workshop with Michelle Bates.