Last year my photographic exhibition of 24 mural prints was traveling in France under the sponsorship of the American Embassy, Paris and the University of San Diego where I am a Professor of Art. I have put together an exhibition of 24 large scale photographs from County fairs in Southern California, pictures that explore subjects that have engaged me now for three decades-that constitute a collective portrait of American life. I accompanied the exhibit as I could, while it traveled to the Euro-American Campus of Sciences Po in Reims, Valenciennes, Cahors, Toulouse, Bordeaux, and Marseilles.
My photographs describe housewives, young teenage boys, grandparents and their grandchildren, complete strangers who happen to meet by accident, and an entire gamut of American types that share the same stage. They represent an endless variety of races, ages, social classes, occupations, ethnicities, and religions. At times they are pictured singly, and at other times they appear in crowds as if in a frieze. Often photographed from a distance normally reserved for family and friends they reveal much more than physical description, but often hint of emotion and interior lives.
These portraits point to concerns outside themselves, and touch upon the pace of modern life in American society driven by technology, and of the challenges of race and class reflective of the diversity at the center of American life. Still these pictures inspire our belief in the American dream-at times fulfilled and at other times as we say "a work in progress".
The prints are 35X47 inches in size, and are meticulously described as a result of an unusual medium format Siciliano camera. Their accuracy approximates view camera work, but the images also carry the instantaneity of small format cameras permitting us to view contemporary life as it is unfolding.
I have had one person shows at major museums in America and abroad including San Diego's Museum of Photographic Arts, The Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, the Worcester Museum, the Narodni National Museum in Prague, the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, the Fitchburg Museum and others. Also I was part of group exhibits at the National Museum of American Art, the Kapfenberg Museum in Austria, the Museet for Fotokunst in Denmark and others as well. Most recently the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington D.C. has invited me for a solo exhibition. In addition Michael Glaser, poet laureate of Maryland has collaborated with me on a particularly unusual set of photographs entitled Between Men and Angels.
Currently I am a Professor of Art at the University of San Diego in California.
