First camera: a Kodak Brownie, vintage 1950s, a thirteenth birthday gift from my grandparents. School over for summer, we traveled by train from Baltimore to their retirement home in Los Angeles. Armed with my newly acquired camera, it was a magical journey, sparking a life-long interest in travel and photography. A surviving black and white photo shows a blurry totem pole shot as the train stopped in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Several decades and cameras later, I continue taking photos--for the love of it, for the way photography requires you to slow down: notice things, pay attention, be present. Nothing beats shooting photos on the street, immersed in life’s rich pageant: the spontaneity of people engaged in everyday living, sensing something surprising or wonderful could happen at any moment. To capture fleeting, candid moments—a sense of place, people being themselves, unposed, at work or play—that’s what I try to do. As street photographer Robert Frank once wrote, "My photographs are not planned or composed in advance, and I do not anticipate that the on-looker will share my viewpoint. However, I feel that if my photograph leaves an image on his mind—something has been accomplished."†
I aim to keep a low profile, stay out of the way, avoid annoying or indulging people, or otherwise become part of a picture. That said, life is unpredictable, circumstances are often a question of happenstance; I try to be open, roll with the situation. No doubt I upset the man grilling meat on a street in Hanoi. The man in white, seated on a bench outside Abdul Gaffor Mosque in Singapore, was at best ambivalent. On the other hand, I could not deny a group of workers, on break inside a Buddhist temple in Yangon, eager to be photographed; or, two women in a small town near Inle Lake, wielding yokes laden with goods, their smiling faces impossible to resist. I'm not always sure, in the moment, whether someone is posturing. Did the police officer in Shanghai, apparently lost in thought, realize he was being photographed?
In responding to a photo, I believe the viewer shares in the photographer’s relationship with his or her subject. In the words of the documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, "Moving in a world so much composed of himself, [the photographer] cannot help but express himself. Every image he sees, every photograph he takes, becomes in a sense a self-portrait. The portrait is made more meaningful by intimacy—an intimacy shared not only by the photographer with his subject but by the audience."‡ In that sense, the viewer is not a passive observer but an active participant, complementing the photographer’s vision.
Through work and travel, I’ve had the privilege and good fortune to visit many places. These photographs reflect my deep appreciation for the opportunities to engage with such an extraordinary diversity of people and places. I hope that the images offer viewers opportunities to consider, in some small way, our common human experience and condition, writ large, on this marvelous and endangered planet.
†Lyons, Nathan, editor.1966. Photographers on Photography. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. p. 67.
‡ Lyons, Nathan, editor.1966. Photographers on Photography. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. p. 71.