About me/A new blog for a new decade

 A new blog for a new decade:

It has been 14 years since I took my first workshop in the Wet Plate Collodion Process. When I started my journey (as a collodionist) in 2006, I was still a photojournalist, but had been working with large format Polaroid Materials, which were becoming extinct. I still lived in Detroit, where I was finishing the restoration of a 120 year old house.  Two storms:  (the economic crash and the demise of print journalism)  on the horizon and I was about to cash in my chips and move to Los Angeles, where I planned to pursue a secondary teaching credential. Have coasted by for years with no health insurance, I decided that I would commit full time to teaching. I was a portrait photographer who did an occasional landscape.

 When you move to LA, you often have to re-invent yourself.  Shortly after moving there, I did my last photo assignment for a print magazine in early 2007. I did complete one last documentary style portrait project-on the Maricachis of Boyle Heights-after getting a grant from the Downtown Artists Group but in late 2007 I acquired all of the gear needed to start working in the wet plate collodion process (which is a very gear and supplies orientated process-for starters you need to have a darkroom handy, and back then you had to purchase chemicals and mix your own collodion, developers, fixers etc).

I taught my first wet plate collodion workshop in December 2007 through the Julia Dean Photo Workshops, which is now the Los Angeles Center of Photography.  I had been introduced to Julia by an old roommate who was a photojournalist, and in the 1990's she had a stock agency, through which I tried to market some of my images of Cuba, a country that I visited several times. 

In late 2008 I moved into a very large shared loft in the LA Artist's District. The loft had been turned into a sort of rooming house by the Korean born Artist Chaa Youn Woo

At the time, the area was still affordable and the building was filled with practicing artists. My room was large enough to be both sleeping quarters and a darkroom/office. In back of the building was a large enclosed garden which served as my studio. I began making work pretty much weekly (the great thing about living in a building full of artists is PEER PRESSURE; when everybody else is creating, you tend to produce more!). I started to meet lots of other creatives/makers and as the economy was in a slump, many people had extra time and were open to collaboration. I started photographing the creations of various fashion designers such as Billy Antiseptic https://www.instagram.com/billyantiseptic/?hl=en and Caley Johnson https://missgdesigns.com/.

I also met and worked with lots of performers and models, and pretty soon I had a pretty amazing new portfolio. By 2010 I was creating work more than once a week-there was actually a month in the summer when I shot every day. Fortunately my roommates were fairly patient about the chemical smells and the parade of Bohemian subjects...

By 2010 I had also left the less stable world of being an adjunct faculty member at a terrible for-profit art and design college (which will remain nameless and has since gone bankrupt) to become a full time secondary photo teacher. This allowed me less time for photo shoots but teaching something that you love is fun and as you get older, it's nice to have health insurance. 

Fast forward to 2020. I moved up to the Bay Area in the summer of 2014, where I have taught at several different high schools.  I have exhibited my work regularly in both solo and group shows (although I am overdue for a solo show). And I have started making a body of landscape tintypes and ambrotypes.

My current location is San Jose CA. It's not as exciting as LA or SF or Oakland, but it's close to my day job and I have my own studio.  I will be posting recent work and eventually, I will be hosting photography workshops again. Until the plague, I was teaching workshops regularly at the Harvey Milk Photo Center  and also twice a year at the Los Angeles Center of Photography

And here is some of my most recent work, a series done over the last couple years that I call "Meditations on the Pacific Coast Highway". These images were made with long exposures and both a half plate and an 8x10 plate camera. My darkroom is now a 1985 Toyota Dolphin. I will post more soon. Enjoy!