I am a photographer and educator with images in private and public collections, including The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, and Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. I’ve also had the pleasure of giving talks and workshops in museums, universities, and high schools under grants from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Recently, I spoke at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts and The Susquehanna Art Museum in Pennsylvania on the subject, “Street photography—looking for meaning and finding it!” In this talk a clear and thrilling relation can be seen between the beauty of images as different as Lewis Hine’s “Italian Immigrant Woman Carrying a Bundle of Cloth,” Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare (Man leaping),” and W. Eugene Smith’s “The Walk to Paradise Garden.” My critical approach is based on this principle stated by Eli Siegel, American educator and founder of Aesthetic Realism: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” I’ve seen time and again how the study of this landmark statement encourages a deeper understanding of photography and a conviction that there is no limit to how much meaning we can find in the world. Working with digital and film formats, I sees the photographic image as a precious object and as a democratic blueprint for how people hope to see the world we are meeting every day.
