My exposure to serious photography came on a retirement trip to New Mexico with a photographer friend.  By chance, we visited Ghost Ranch, in Abiquiu, (Georgia O’Keefe country), and signed up to take a landscape photography class the following fall. The class included shooting around the ranch and working in the dark room: developing and printing our work. The instructor, Kent Bowser, was particularly supportive and helpful to me, making up for my obvious deficiencies in technical knowledge and lack of experience in the darkroom.  I fell in love not only with the natural beauty of northern New Mexico but with the process of learning to capture what I love and what I see.

 

At home, another photographer friend recommended a class offered through continuing Education at Stanford, taught by a young emerging artist, Adam Katseff. The title of the class was Photography as Art. I had no idea what that meant or what I would be doing in the class but I jumped into creating series of work.  Adam was very encouraging and helped me to develop the more artistic side of what I was doing, while still struggling to make up for the deficiencies in my technical background. I never became proficient enough in the darkroom to translate what I saw into a satisfactory print, and when digital cameras became mainstream tools, I made the switch.

 

The works on this website are major projects that I’ve done over the years since I started photography. The oldest one, Arastradero Ghosts, was done in black-and-white film with hand-cut images or subjects scanned onto plain colored backgrounds. With Des Comestibles, I was digitally photographing smaller objects exploring light, shapes and textures and a certain ambiguity that I find intriguing. In more recent work, I am still exploring shape, texture and light, but with a greater awareness of personal meaning and content. These images are digital layers created in Photoshop where the background is a more intentional choice and varies with each image.

 

I am still looking for ambiguity and mystery, creating images that realize a feeling or memory of mine but, hopefully, provide an opportunity for the viewer to connect with their own memories and feelings.

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I have shown work in juried exhibits at the Palo Alto Art League, the library at Rinconada in Palo Alto, and the PRAXIS Gallery in Minneapolis.

 

I have exhibited work in shows at the Wheelhouse in San Jose, the Palo Alto Arts Center, the Mountain View School of Music and Art.

 

A number of images from Unmoored are currently hung at the Rose Kleiner Center in Mountain View.