My first camera was my father's Miranda D which we shared. I was 14 when I won a Cherry Blossom Festival photography contest which led to a job at two local newspapers, The Belleville Times and The Nutley Sun, shooting high school sports, local civic events and every now and then requests from the police to photograph accidents. To do this, the newspapers loaned me several Nikon cameras, lenses and flash, great equipment too expensive for my family to afford. I was paid a dollar for each photograph printed until they started printing many more images. Then I was paid $10 a week. This arrangement continued for the rest of high school and my father and I worked in the darkroom together making prints. He and I shared photography for the rest of his life.

The advent of digital photography, Photoshop and extremely high-quality digital printers allowed the privacy and focus and facility to become fully immersed in a process of producing images;  the act of photography, the pleasure of the photograph, the slow process of seeing and working the image, the physical shift when the image is printed. I experienced this as an opportunity to understand a language that I had never fully questioned; black & white, color, cropping, representation, abstraction, shading, saturation, print size, even framing the print---what did these "mean?" So many decisions for each image and not any clear understanding of what I was doing.

Over time, I began to allow an exchange between the image and the work toward a print. At some point something wants or demands or allows me to capture an image. Then later I might begin to see what I had been seeing that I really didn't know; the aesthetic or social moment that was, or was not, alive just then.