Included here is a brief biography of my life and work, my artist statement, as well as technical information about the photographic equipment and processes I use.

Biography

I discovered my passion for photography in high school 1972. It was an overwhelmingly enjoyable experience to discover this medium through which I could express myself artistically. My photography teacher was a great inspiration, and I knew without a doubt that I had found my future career.

I carried a camera everywhere I went, capturing the lives of my friends and events around me. I photographed constantly and the camera allowed me to enter fully into life, rather than abstract myself from it. The camera became, in a sense, an extension of my body and gave me a way to relate to others with a purpose. It was a very magical time.

After high school, I began a four-year diploma course in photography at the Prahan Institute of Technology. After one year, my pursuit of photography took a different course _ I felt the need for hands-on experience, and from that point, my training took the form of apprenticing with accomplished photographers. In the early years, my principal interest was in art photography, especially the nude subject. A few of those earlier images are represented here on this website. Over time, as I developed professionally, and worked as a freelance photographer, my vision extended into the various fields of commercial photography.

In 1985, I came across the Spiritual teachings of the Adept Adi Da Samraj. This was not just an intellectual exercise of reading his books - I found myself literally experiencing His Spiritual Blessing filling and pervading my entire being as I read and heard his arguments relative to Spiritual matters and Ultimate Truth. Adi Da is not just a religious scholar, but also an Adept, that is, One Who has Realized the Divine and has the Power to Transmit an initiatory glimpse of that Realization to others. Even though I had not yet seen Him, and was only studying His Books and tapes from afar, this was my experience.

By 1989, having grown utterly weary of the commercial photography scene and becoming increasingly interested in Spirituality, I closed my studio and moved to the Fiji Islands in the South Pacific, to live and practice a Spiritual way of life under Adi Da's direct guidance. I continued to take photographs, but this time it was for the many publications and books of Adidam. I remained in Fiji for ten years, which were the greatest and most valuable years of my life to date.

In 1999, Adi Da Himself began taking photographs for the first time, as a means of granting Spiritual instruction through images. Within these few short years, He has compiled some 20,000 extraordinary art images (I have included the link to the website www.daplastique.com, which represents a mere fraction of His work). It was this work that inspired me to once again take up photography purely as an art form, but this time with a greater understanding and depth.

Artist's Statement

The artistic process, like any creative process, always seems to require a difficult struggle and a personal ordeal to produce a result that reflects our inner feelings, experiences or deep intuitions. Often it is difficult to know what these feelings or intuitions are and the process may also become a way to help clarify them. When an artist gets out of the way and just produces work with no mind about it, it may be seen that the work is Divinely inspired.

It is this creative process itself that is so very interesting to me. The struggle, the ordeal and the overcoming of one's own limits and self-consciousness in creativity represent a great challenge. It is a way of finding out about ourselves and the intuitive depth of existence. If I am not involved in this process, I feel fundamentally that my life has turned to mediocrity and the process of growth has temporarily ceased.

My interest has come full circle, and I work primarily with the nude figure, largely in the outdoor environment. Because the nude body represents individuals in their most vulnerable and fully revealed state, nude photography has the power to express, and therefore invoke, all the emotions that we experience. Erotic images are not my primary interest, although I have nothing against them. Rather my intention is, through my photography to produce art that freely reveals the full range of human emotion, including everything to do with our natural sexuality. I am also very much attracted to the mechanical and technical aspect of the body with all its bone structure and fleshiness.

When working with someone, I very much like to participate in the process together with that person and welcome his or her input and participation. The more that I get to know and photograph any particular person the easier it is to create images that are going to have more of a magical quality and perhaps even the feeling and intuition of a deeper reality. The nudes by other photographers that I most enjoy usually capture this feeling and the relationship between the photographer and the person being photographed is usually very intimate.

Thank you for listening and I welcome any feedback and comments.

Technical Information

I shoot all my images onto film and do not use digital cameras at all. Most of the images you see on this site are shot on 4x5 inch large format film. The rest are shot on 6x7cm medium format and 35mm. I love to have a negative and consider this medium to be the principal art work.

I am a perfectionist and go to great lengths to ensure perfect final prints. Most of the prints are very high quality, due to the size of the negative to begin with.

For those that are interested, below are some technical details on equipment, film, exposure, processing, and printing.

Format:

I am not fixed to any one format. In principal, I will use the largest format camera that enables me to capture the image most effectively. I use 35mm, medium format, and large format cameras. For 35mm, I use Nikon camera bodies and lenses. For medium format I use a Mamiya Pro RZ67. And for large format I use a Sinar F2 and a Cambo Wide DS.

Film:

I shoot on all kinds of B&W negative and color slide films.

Exposure:

I use predominantly the reflected zone system method and check my results against a densitometer.

Film Processing:

I process all the B&W film myself in a variety of chemicals, depending on the film type, lighting and contrast required in the final print. In some cases I will scan the negatives that I wish obtain more control over and will do my dodging and burning in Photoshop, without changing the original image in any fundamental way (except where I might place them together as a triptych for example or where directly intended and stated). I then have large professional negatives made from these files and make my final prints from these.

Printing:

Silver Gelatin prints.