I am a photographer.

When I was 13, I dreamed of being able to say those words. I started in a photo studio in town, sweeping the floor and discovering the darkroom in my neighbor's portrait studio, where I worked on Saturday afternoons. My mother gave me some old dark green drapes and a corner in the basement of our house on Long Island. That was the first darkroom and the first of many for the next 40 years. The first camera was a Baby Brownie Special - film size 127. Never stopping with the camera and in the darkroom, I went the usual route, chasing my dream. Photographing for friends, employers, the local paper and then the US Army. Coming out of the army, I shared a studio in Manhatten with Jacques Lowe, a photographer who documented the campaign of Robert Kennedy and later president John Kennedy and the first family. His rep.' agreed to manage me as well and he began getting me assignments from ad agencies and magazines. I remember coming to the studio days after the president was assassinated. Jacques was devastated and ordered George (his representative) to get all the Kennedy negatives into a safe deposit box at once. The sad thing is that their safe deposit box where the precious negatives were stored was in the World Trade Center...

Those early days in New York were so formative for me. Looking across 6th Avenue from Jacques' shooting room, I could see through the gloomy windows into the studio of W. Eugene Smith, of Life magazine fame. I often saw him moving about in the dim light, hanging 11x14's on a clothesline...

I eventually rented a loft in Greenwich Village and spent the next years shooting ads for major agencies. Some studio, some travel and most often people. Then a move to Massachusetts in the early 70's and a life in the woods of a small isolated village. From Bleeker street to New Salem road...

I formed a good relationship with Polaroid in Boston just as Dr. Edwin land introduced his SX-70 camera.

The work with Polaroid grew as I began developing local clients in Western Massachusetts. The strangest and most challenging assignment came from Polaroid using the SX-70. I made an image of a kindly man with his grandaughter sitting on his knee, both non professional models, he in his late 50's, she 5 years old. The photo was sent in to Polaroid. I got a call a few days later to come into Cambridge to discuss THE PHOTO   . Could I make 10,000 original polaroids of the image? Polaroid wanted an original of the image in every major camera store in America. I took the assignment and drove home designing a way to mount four cameras with a single cable release. We did 1500 a day on good weather days. For the next thirty years I just kept working and shooting and having fun - magazine covers and travel, new challenges and new friends. Working with and being part of teams of great talent, great designers and art directors. I continue to see the world through my rangefinder eyes always needing to collect images with the black box called a CAMERA. To me, what has gone before, the big names, the celebrity, the successes, have little to do with tomorrow.

I believe that today is the time to think about a new image, a new way of seeing, a releasing of my need to express.