BIO
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| War Politics Fashion |
| War: Very early on in my life, I had come to the realization that photography was all I wanted to do. This clarity came about with the divorce of my parents at the age of nine, by creating a situation where I was to end up growing up near Clark Air Base in the Philippines. Putting me into a community run on the industry of war. This is where I would spend the rest of my childhood summers and partial school years, living with my father and stepmother. Exposing me to a culture so foreign, foreign to everything I had been taught up to that point in America. A contradiction to everything I thought and was told to believe. The Philippines is where I was exposed to daily combat photography, through the morning delivery of the US military paper, The Stars & Stripes. Daily Vietnam, through wire and military photography. This was to be my career choice, this is what I wanted to do. Nothing, you can really sit down with your parents and say, oh I want to grow up to be a war photographer. Which is what I ended up doing the first 20 years of my career. Conflict photography! Conflict photography to the point, where I couldn’t see straight anymore. At one point realizing I needed off, I wanted to stop, I was like a mouse in a cage running on the wheel, never to get off, until it was going to kill me. In 2000 in Chechnya, something very crystal happened to me while photographing on the front lines outside of Grozny, Here I was half way around the world, attempting to photograph another idiot with a gun. A man trying to kill another man. All the while someone else is trying to kill him at the same time. During the struggle to make that picture, a crystal moment came into my mind through fear, when I realized if I was fortunate enough to make it to 70 or 80, the pictures I would want to hold in my hand, were not of this man with a gun. But they were the pictures of my then 2 year old daughter, pictures that I did not have. Pictures that I had never taken. That’s how I found out how to get off the wheel. Which led to my 8 year assignment as a White House photographer for Time Magazine. Politics: Covering the White House was the complete opposite of conflict photography. War photography for me was very uncontrolled, fluid and invigorating. While with the White House everything is staged and controlled. Where you can stand, where you can sit, what you can see and not see, are all dictated by your handlers. It was in the this very sterile and controlled Republican world that I was now working. All this helped push my photography in a new direction. A direction of a very controlled, sterile image, an image where everything is in its place. A perfect little Republican World, My America. Fashion: Currently I’m a regular contributor with the Italian fashion magazine AMICA, with projects ranging from global reportage, to portraits, all the way to fashion related subjects. Stories, that have enabled me to continue with the straight and modern anthropological style that I have grown so fond of. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |