This Is My Lens

Before I was a photographer, I was an observer. I've worn a lot of hats. I was a cold war soldier standing watch over nuclear missiles in West Germany. I’ve worked inside a brutal Texas prison farm. I studied street ethnography under J. Bryan Page, one of the country’s leading researchers on drug use at the margins of society. For a year, I worked on the streets of Miami, observing the lives of people surviving addiction, sex work, poverty, and criminalization. I trained in humanistic psychology and observational research with the renowned humanistic psychologist, Clark E. Moustakas. I’ve counseled teens in juvenile diversion programs, prisons, and runaway shelters. I've counseled families living in crushing poverty in Hawaii I’ve been inside the wire at Guantanamo Bay.

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

For years, I lived alongside state power—sometimes resisting it, sometimes managing it, sometimes simply trying to make space for someone else’s humanity to survive within it.

Along the way I had the good fortune of learning photography from my closest friend and mentor, the brilliant commercial and aerial photographer Bob Maser (RIP). I learned to see through the lens. But I told myself I couldn’t afford to be the photographer. I had mouths to feed. A government career. Work that paid the bills. Occasionally satisfying, never really fulfilling. Only now—free from those constraints—have I finally stepped into the role I’d been circling all along.

Bob Maser doing what he loved.

What I See Now

I don’t photograph to comment—I photograph to observe. As a photographer, when you scan through your images and land on the one that speaks for the moment, it’s like a door opening. Something clicks—not just in the frame, but in you. The image doesn’t explain. It doesn’t argue. It simply reveals what was already there, waiting to be seen.

What I see in the street is not chaos, but conscience. In the built environment, I see the quiet architecture of authority—how space instructs behavior, how power is etched into the curb. In nature, I see not escape, but a sacred rhythm that reminds us of who we are before the systems we build.

My artistic vision is grounded in presence, empathy, and moral imagination. I’m drawn to moments that resist spectacle and demand attention—a glance, a gesture, a sunrise that evokes something unsaid but deeply felt. These are the quiet truths that photography can hold without explanation.

Why I Photograph

I photograph because we live in a time that dulls our attention, flattens our sense of connection, and rewards detachment. My work is an act of resistance to that drift.

Photography, for me, is sacred listening. It’s how I honor acts of care, defiance, labor, and being—how I say, “This matters. I was here. So were they.”

This is my practice.

This is my lens.

This is how I exercise my moral imagination.

I hope it speaks to you as it speaks to me.

Heavy cloud cover rolls in—great for contrast, moody skies, and deep shadows. But in this sweltering July heat, it’s also a sign of a dangerous feedback loop: more heat, more moisture, more storms. The climate isn’t just changing—it’s compounding.