I began photographing the summer before I went to law school and after three years of practicing law I drove to Tucson to pursue a Masters of Fine Arts in photography. At that time, W. Eugene Smith had been hired to teach but he tragically died in the summer before his first semester on staff. One of the persons who replaced Eugene Smith was Frederick Sommer and I became immersed in pictorial logic. A second compelling reason to study in Tucson was the newly established Center for Creative Photography, a repository for the archives of 20th century photographers.
My first experimentation with the medium of photography was in 1983 using an 8" x 10" Deardorff view Camera and exposing directly onto cibachrome paper loaded into the film holders. Previously I had accidentally doubled exposed a negative in the Deardorff and I relied on this in 1987 for a few years to work on the series of multiple exposures in camera (35mm) firstly on the murals and paintings in Mexico and paintings in South America and subsequently in their streets. The Mexico and Cuba Compositions are my first attempt at exhibition presentation where the concern is less for the shape of the final image and more for the balance and weight, tension and integrity, and extension and contraction of the relationships of the component photographs. The random symmetrical asymmetrical image shapes have each been defined by the integrity of the masses, spaces and colours in a tensegral whole. I wanted to make images that included freedom, flow, dance and yoga. Each image is a composition as an expression without compression or collapse.