I was born in Kenmore, the poorest white neighborhood in Akron, Ohio, but was lucky in that during that time the Akron Art Museum was a photo mini-powerhouse, showing everything from Harry Callahan to Carrie Mae Weems, funding Lee Friedlander’s seminal book, Factory Valleys, and organizing—yes, it’s true—Cindy Sherman’s first touring exhibit which ended at the Whitney but started in Akron. And I saw everything.

I missed most of my senior year in high school—they made new rules to throw me out since I was still showing up for tests and doing well—but I spent an awful lot of that time in the school darkroom, the teacher pretending not to see me as I snuck in.

Technology has always fascinated me and I wrote my first generative art projects on my new Mac Plus in 1986. Ten years later I made the photographic prints that I sold on the new World Wide Web on my kitchen table darkroom—$450 for a 11x14 print in the mid-ninties! Ten years after that I was the first (that I am aware of) to create an app-as-art-object for the iPad, available on the App Store. Ten years on I sold a set of prints to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the final batch shepherded into the collection there by Anne Wilkes Tucker. In 2020 I self-published my first book, Computational Photography, the title describing an aesthetic methodology more than anything do to with computers.

Somewhere in there I got a masters degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government—which I consider one of the finest art schools in the world—and worked real jobs with paychecks, 401ks and everything. My peers were a little shocked when I quit to go back to making art.

From July 2020 to Easter Day 2021 I wrote an art photography blog as a Covid project, trying to post four or five times a week, a total of one hundred and fifty articles, often long and involved. Often too long and too involved, though my book reviews proved especially popular. The experience was incredibly rewarding but exhausting—like social media, you have to “feed the beast” non-stop. Audiences are so easily distracted!

I make photographs, videos, and generative art, nearly worship Stanley Kubrick, have little use for sontagbarthesbergerbenjaminism, and when I finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian I paused, then turned to the first page and read it again. Yes.

As I get older I’m getting more photo ideas and better ones, too, which greatly surprises me.