My eyes became the lens through which I recorded images until I first "borrowed" my father's camera, an Agfa Agfamatic. After retrieving the developed images were overexposed, underexposed, and mostly out of focus and blurry. It was back to the library to learn again. This time photography.
In college, I studied Fine Arts which focused on the traditional disciplines in art such as painting which I studied but came to the realization that the studio program focused on photrealism, which frustrated me until a new professor elevated the fledgling photography course into a recognized fine art. I applied as an apprentice to HIRO and was accepted and once again I left another school and spent the next 3 years in New York City learning as I immersed myself in my apprenticeship. Afterward, I returned to Ohio and for a short period opened a commercial studio before I left for The Maine Photographic Workshops in Rockport Maine.
I grew up there
I spent a lot of time there. There being home in Delaware, Ohio, but summers became Maine and later on Cape Cod and later still in the West and Southwest. The rest of the year(s) were spent in different schools that hadn't yet the good sense to tell my parents another school just might be better for my growth and education. I didn't seem to fit in. I didn't want to.
Nightly, I would slip out to explore returning just before breakfast. I wandered downtown Detroit, Chicago, Boston, San Fransisco, Albuquerque, and other cities. I walked gullies, streams, roadhouses, and midnight farms in rural places. I liked that.
Images started to find a place to reside in my head which I would commit to paper, in an obvious crude form, so I taught myself to draw which meant in a library. Libraries became my home and travel agent to find newer places to explore, remember, and then commit that which I had seen to paper. Along the way, I met people who varied but were far different from the people I knew at home. Many took me under their wing to literally protect me, a kid from a small town in a place I shouldn't be.
