Street Sight

I was never formally trained in photography. My interest in it began from watching my dad photograph family events and the coil-bound storybooks of black and white prints he would later bring back from the drugstore.

Background & Experience

Much of what I learned came from experience, library books, and the explosion of photo magazines that sprung up in the '60s and '70s. It wasn't until the early 1980s after moving to Washington when I took a job in the field, printing historical photos for the Library of Congress.

I enjoyed working in the darkroom printing the work of great photographers such as Dorthea Lange, Walker Evans, Jack Delano, John Vachon, Ansel Adams (his Manzanar Internment Camp photos), Timothy O'Sullivan, and Mathew Brady, among others. It was a privilege being entrusted to handle their negatives.

Outside of work, I spent much of my time walking around the city documenting events, meeting people, and building my own collection of images, inspired by the work I did on the job.

After more than three years at the Library of Congress, I went to work at The Washington Post where I processed film, printed photos and photographed fashion, studio and Style assignments. I was there during the Post's transition from film to digital photography, when my job became looking over each day's stream of thousands of images from around the world to find those that best illustrated daily news stories. I then went on to become a photo editor for the still-new Washingtonpost.com.

The hectic pace of daily news only intensified my personal work, though I rarely had time to print my own photos. Now is when I get to bring to life those images I witnessed in my viewfinder so many years ago.

The Slideshow

The dogs on the motorbike is from a recent trip to Rome where I almost exclusively used a digital camera. I took along a 35mm Minox with black and white film, but both film and camera went through the security x-ray, so I was not keen on using it at the time. 

Click the image below for a slideshow. 

(Click or tap each image to advance. Click/tap outside the image to exit)