It wasn’t until I was 50 that I took up photography again. Having majored in studio art, with photography as my focus, I had let all that slide mostly because at that point in my 20’s I did not have the confidence to do art without the structure of a class. Computer programming became my career, which allowed me to use my left brain in a fun way. Having worked in computers also serves me well now as I am very comfortable with technology.

After 9-11 (the reminder that life is short), I took a little 4-week class on using the Holga camera, of which I had never heard. My career took off quickly, and for awhile there was no day that went by that I was not exhibiting somewhere. I’m still mostly known for the style that became known as ‘Holgaramas’… panoramas of sorts… shot with this silly plastic film camera called the Holga. The technique involves only partially advancing the film between shots, so that the exposures overlap. This results in one long “image” (actually made up of many shots), working out to be the length of half of a roll of medium-format film. My method of shooting was very fast and spontaneous, but the final images took a lot of post-production (i.e. work in Photoshop) to get the tonality to even out.

After that point I went entirely digital and I proceeded to doing motion shots of people walking. For many of these I was sitting on the ground with a tiny tripod and doing long exposures that would have some parts of the image in focus and other parts blurred. Both these and the Holga work were all about movement.

For awhile now, my primary subject has been stuff I find on the ground, lately in the form of diptychs and triptychs. I live in the East Village of New York City, which is a neighborhood largely gentrified now, but which still has a lot more trash than elsewhere. Yes, a lot of my pictures are of trash, or tiny little discarded things, and of spills that can make great abstractions. I’m pretty democratic in the objects I’m drawn to photograph… meaning almost nothing is ruled out, though I gravitate to things I experience as abstract. I somehow find art in the detritus and whatever I stumble upon on the street. So you can say I’m a street photographer… literally!

Have fun looking through all the strange quirky things I find worthy of being photographed, and know that I do think these unlikely things are beautiful, maybe you will too.