Excerpts from a Visual Diary and Côte-à-Côte
November 4 – 27, 1999
My photographic work deals largely with issues that perpetually intrigue me. One of these is simply that inner lives of children as it is expressed through their play. For the past sixteen years I have kept of sort of “visual diary” of my own kids’ activities, trying to capture as honestly as possible their experiences. Over time the work has evolved like play can be, but of how much work it is! I see these photos as an antidote to the plethora of images which fictionalize and trivialize childhood by ignoring its serious nature.
Another of my interest is in the acquisition and use of new languages, both visual and verbal. The diptychs are from a recent body of work entitled “Cote-a-Cote” and they deal with my experiences dealing with language barriers I have encountered in my 30-year struggle to learn to speak French and to learn to see in new ways. They reflect the notion that in learning a new language we constantly yet unconsciously impose on the world a matrix (again, visual or verbal) through which we attempt to make sense of it. From me, they also serve as reminders of the joys of being visually overwhelmed.
I was born and raised in Walla Walla, Washington. That alone is enough to have shaped my vision of the world: at once beautiful, comic, complex, and surreal.
While an undergraduate at Washington State University in the late 1960s I bought my first camera: an old box-style camera that I found in a second-hand story for fifty cents, a pretty primitive device with no controls whatsoever. But I shot dozens of rolls of film with it trying to emulate the historic and contemporary photographs that appealed to me. While not having a lot of success in that endeavor, I did have a lot of fun; and I became hooked on making photographs.
During my junior year I had the good fortune to participate in a study-abroad program at Avignon in the south of France. This experience was my first exposure to a culture that allowed one a total immersion in the world of art. It was also the first time that I used a 35mm camera and attempted to make “serious” photographs. My time in France was the best education I ever had and it quite literally changed the trajectory of my life. I came home with a serious case of wanderlust and a new direction to my subsequent course of studies.
My undergraduate degree was in Psychology but I went to graduate school in Fine Arts, receiving my M.F.A. in Photography from W.S.U. in 1975. Since then I have worked and taught, first at Diablo Valley College in California, and, from 1979 to 2019 at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. I have also had the good fortune to have my work exhibited on a fairly regular basis for the past 50 years. In the fall of 2001, I was honored to have a one-person show of my work at a gallery in Paris.
The photos I exhibited in 1999 at Blue Sky came from two series that I was working on at the time. The first one was entitled “Excerpts from a Visual Diary” and consisted of images that I made of my three children on a daily basis as they were growing up. These photos were intended as an antidote to the plethora of images which fictionalize and trivialize childhood by ignoring its serious nature. There can be a lot of joy in childhood, to be sure, but there also can be a lot of terror, danger, and confusion. Old age may not be for sissies, but neither is childhood. It takes courage to be a kid.
The second series, “Côte-à-Côte” (Side-by-Side), was an attempt to deal with the strong emotions I felt on returning to France in 1993 after a 24-year absence. I was literally overwhelmed, not only by how the country had changed but by the sights, the sounds, the smells, the tastes, and by my sense of having lost so much of my language skills that communicating effectively was a struggle. My sense of being adrift was difficult to convey in a single image but I found that by printing two negatives that were next to one another on a roll of film I could create a visual semblance of how I was feeling as well as present a visual puzzle for the viewer which mimicked my own befuddlement at times.