I am a fine art photographer using a Nikon digital camera. I concentrate on nature, especially plants, although I am also likely to make pictures of humans or their creations, be they buildings or trash on the sidewalk. 

I am a huge fan of the photographic idiom. I’ll never forget being gobsmacked in college by the incredible photographs of Emmet Gowin, nor my sense of awe when I first saw the works of Walker Evans, Diane Arbus and Sally Mann. 

I am an unashamed devotee of the “retinal” approach to visual art. While images may have a political or social meaning, in the end they must work on their own terms as objects of either beauty or fascination. I am in agreement with this 2018 quote from Peter Schjeldahl, art critic at The New Yorker magazine: “Why do political partisans ever place faith in fine art, which has proved incorrigibly hedonistic for, to date, thousands of years?”

Except for 12 years on the East Coast, I have lived my life in the Midwest, a region whose sere beauty and generous skies inspire me. I have worked as a journalist and a high school teacher as well as a photographer.