My personal background has been equally rich. I was born to an American artist mother and a Czech geophysicist father. My parents wanted to share their boundless curiosity with their children, and so by my 18th birthday we had lived in nine homes in the United States and Europe. I was exposed to fossilized dinosaur tracks, Roman ruins, cave dwellings, Indian pueblos, and the great museums, castles, and cathedrals of Europe. Upon our arrival in Switzerland in 1960, I was given a camera in honor of the Alps that ringed the horizon; I used it with abandon, albeit with b/w.

In college, my desire to become an artist led me first to art history and later to graphics; I spent long hours in the studios, working at honing my skills in woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, and serigraphs. Tired of the time it took to finalize an idea, I began to combine those disciplines with photography. By the time I graduated from George Washington University in 1969, I remained self-taught as there was no major in photography.

Upon graduation, I worked at the Smithsonian's Arts & Industries, National Portrait Gallery, and National Collection of Fine Arts museums; a year later I left to curate photography exhibits for Sen. Howard H. Baker, Jr. This led to other opportunities, the first of which was as Chief Photographer for the Office of Economic Opportunity. While at OEO I traveled across America portraying the poor and making pictures which reminded me of those made by FSA photographers during the 1930's and '40's. Following my year at OEO, I moved to the Appalachian Regional Commission for two years. There I portrayed the heart of poverty-stricken mountain people in gritty black and white for their magazine, Appalachia.

Concurrently with the Appalachian assignments, I was on contract to TIME magazine, working mostly with the military or the looming Watergate hearings. Although I could watch history in the making, 'hard' news was not for me.

Subsequent interests in the mid-1970's involved working Americans; I shared in a grant from the Upjohn Institute for American Labor Studies in 1974. The following year I received a stipend from the Smithsonian to study the occupational folklife of locksmen on the St. Lawrence Seaway; I spent two months on the Seaway portraying the men on their 24-hour schedules.

One of the most rewarding work experiences I had during this period was to photograph the thirteen-week long Bicentennial Festival of American Folklife's Working Americans section, funded by the National Park Service, the Smithsonian and the Departments of Labor and Transportation. I worked alongside historians and anthropologists to gain invaluable experience and knowledge. Working with occupational folklorists gave me the impetus to do more serious work with my pictures of the hand of man on America. This interest has evolved into a project upon which I spend most of my earnings.

In 1979, I moved to Copenhagen, as I hoped Denmark's radically different culture might provide new challenges. My career took me to widespread locations in this little country of 20-hour summer days with a sun that rose and set to the north. During this period I traveled extensively outside Denmark while doing commercial photography for northern European corporations like Bang & Olufsen, Esso, Volvo, Georg Jensen, nv Phillips, Bing & Grøndahl, Royal Danish Porcelain Works, Danske Bank, PrivateBanken, Carlsberg, Statsanstalten for Livsforsikring, and Mærsk Shipping. I also received direct corporate support from Polaroid, Ilford Photo (Ciba-Geigy), and Kodak. But as a non-Dane, I was barred from receiving state arts funding, a discovery which tied to other discrimination, contributed to my departure from Denmark.

But my experience in Denmark altered me as little else could; my work was filled commercial assignments of such complexity and depth that I was challenged in ways I had not thought possible. All this while becoming more Danish than the Danes. Learning to speak, read and write Danish as well as some Swedish and Norwegian was hard; when added to the French and German from my youth, the command of these languages gave me the freedom to travel throughout northern and Europe in search of the mystical scenes and 'scapes which caught my eye.

At times brisk westerly winds blew puffy white clouds over glaciated landscapes and at others dense fogs wrapped the countries in softness. I roamed across Denmark, becoming an eternal tourist at large. At times my desire to photograph that which I saw outdoors overcame me, compelling me to go outdoors, sometimes in mid-sentence to capture purple winter storm skies or white walls washed with impossibly rich orange hues.

Ultimately Danish socialism overpowered me and I left Denmark in 1989. I returned home to enjoy the Bill of Rights, the free speech it guarantees and to photograph the places in America I had missed so dearly through my decade-long absence.

Renewing my interests in my home country was not as difficult as I had imagined, but I saw things differently and sometimes reacted negatively to what America had become during my ten-year absence. Being based in Washington DC gave me access to a wide range of topics, although I sought to restart my work on the Potomac River. This resulted in the first series of prints after my return and is called: Potomac - East/West, a series of 30 images shot from 1990 to 1992.

In March 1993, I began a nearly two month residency at the artists’ colony of Yaddo. While at Yaddo, I developed new printing styles and due to a 42 inch snowfall a week after my arrival, was forced to delay my plan to work with landscapes along the Hudson River. I instead shot portraits of my fellow artists, as well as a series of nudes.From this residency I produced an editioned series of 20 20x24 inch prints which was to be my last edition of silver gelatin prints.

In 1994-95 I was awarded a grant from the Graham Foundation to photograph disappearing family farms in Waukesha County WI. This project showed the urbanization of this mostly rural county in central Wisconsin as it lay between Chicago, Milwaukee, and Madison.This grant and the project it funded (Milking the Welsh Hills) meant that after 1995, I no longer took assignments. Losing the controls effected by creative directors, art directors, and layouts gave me the freedom to reinvent my vision of photography and concentrate my efforts on a whole range of new topics centered around my love of the land.

Also during the mid-1990's I worked on a series called Water Works, on the revival of mill towns and mills along the Merrimac River from Manchester NH to Lawrence, Lowell, and other water-powered mill towns along the river in Massachusetts. During the same time period, I began to photograph California & The West and shot mostly in sparsely populated regions of California and Nevada.

In Wisconsin I had experimented with wide angle and panorama photography to better portray the many farms I found myself involved with and by the end of 1995, I had pretty much abandoned normal format photography in favor of panoramas. While I continue to work with a few non-panoramic cameras, the great bulk of my work has become panoramic in nature. By the time I reached the Nevada Test Site in the Winter of 1996, my vision of landscapes had enlarged itself to allow me to photograph pretty much everything I could see. This provided new challenges, as working with such an encompassing format required another way of looking at my surroundings.

Working with the vast spaces of the NTS and the Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and California deserts gave me the chance to work in the ‘dust bowl’ region which was so instrumental at the start of the Great Depression in the 1930's and 40's. Exploring such a vast area was exciting and brought me places I had not visited since living in the west as a child. There was no vista too great for me as my partner and I traveled through the vast states of the far west. I renewed my interest in Yosemite, Death Valley, Bodie, and many other places in between. In 1996-98, I completed two more series of images, the first of which was California & The West, and which contained images in places also visited by American landscapists during the first part of the 20th century. The other series was Ghost of the Atom, which were images made at atomic weapons test facilities, including the Nevada Test Site, White Sands Missile Range, downwind fallout areas near St. George UT, White Sands NM, and a large portions of central Nevada and New Mexico.

In the winter of 1997, I began working on Battlefield Parks: Fields of Blood, Rivers of Tears. This is a series of panoramas of Civil War battlefields stretching from Pennsylvania to New Mexico. Now it is 2004, and I am still at work on the fields of the gun. I hope that by the summer of 2004, I can bring the Civil War battlefield series to a close with 85 critical battlefields and related historic sites in fifteen states. Somebody asked why I didn't shoot all the battlefields and my response is this: There were more than 10,600 battles and to do them all, I would have to have been born with a loaded camera in my hand.

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2001

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Upjohn Institute for American Labor Studies: Assembly work

Professional affiliations:

Nonstøck, Inc. (800) 673-6222 5 W 19th St, New York, NY 10011
PhotoNations - photonations.com

www.MastersofPhotography.com

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