My story

Photograph of my son’s sunflower, which started as a small seed. We delighted in watching it unfold petal by petal.

I can trace my passion for photography easily enough. At the age of 12, I smuggled the family’s Polaroid camera out of the house to photograph a secret place I had discovered in the neighborhood. It was a simple pond, with wild tree limbs reaching over the water in a way that to me, was just perfect. The place felt so sacred, so special at the time, I wanted to have a photo of it to tuck away in my treasure box. A decade later I found myself working as a reporter for a small community newspaper, and often took photos to accompany my stories. It only took a single photograph to re-ignite my interest in the art. While covering a county fair, I captured the image of an 8-year-old girl eating a slice of watermelon. At the moment my finger released the shutter, she had gazed mischievously up at her mother with the most perfect droplet of juice glistening from the side of her chin. Years would pass, and the newspaper’s method of not “fixing” the final published photographs in the darkroom eventually aged and yellowed the print beyond recognition. Although fleeting, that image stayed with me all these years. I’ve taken thousands of photographs since then, I guess in an effort to keep reliving that initial excitement. It’s also my way little way of, in the words of Anais Nin, “…tasting life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.”