Where I've been and what I've learned along the way…
While vacationing on the Mississippi River we noticed this small steam-powered riverboat called the Julia Belle Swain. That name seemed very familiar. Then I recalled a John Hartford song by the same name (from his 1976 album Mark Twang). Sure enough, this was the very boat he piloted and sang about!
Mark Twain published his description of Life on the Mississippi in 1883.
Photography was my first creative outlet. I started in my father’s darkroom around age 15. I grew up admiring the work of Steichen, Adams, Bourke-White, Weston, and most of all Cartier-Bresson. His “The Decisive Moment” (2) was an early inspiration for me. In the introduction he wrote…
The decisive moment … is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression.
