2013 was the year everything changed in the ever-changing world of imaging and design software, and I was there when it happened.

I met Cindy Sherman once, an artist who uses a camera to record herself dressed up as fictional characters ripe with feminist undertones. Beginning in the late 1970s, projects like her "Untitled Film Stills" threw both the art world and the photography world into a tizzy– mouthpieces for both worlds either loved her or hated her.

Tom and I glanced at each other, exhaled, and were surely thinking the same thing: “Holy fuck– that was close”.

We all have our 9/11 stories. Some of them are horrific on an unimaginable scale. Most of them are much smaller and indirect but still affecting on a personal scale

On and off over the past year I've been looking thru a lot of old film for various reasons, and recently I came across this. No, I'm not old enough to have photographed President Kennedy, but I am old enough to have known a guy who did.

In June, 2014, I gave my first and only graduation speech as Academic Director at New England School of Photography. It was an exciting and optimistic event, and I was honored to play a small part in it. Here is what I had to say...

Do you guys like to travel? Good, because you’re all about to take a trip. All these folks up here are on their own trip already and can tell you all about what the’ve seen along the way so far. But that’s their trip, not yours. 

I don’t know about you, but every now and then I have to stop and think about what we reallymean when we parrot back some of the concepts so many of us take for granted about photography. Right now, I’m hung up on the old saw we roll out whenever we attempt to differentiate ourselves from the great unwashed masses wielding their iPhones and their selfie sticks. 

It’s the one attributed to the very quotable Ansel Adams, the one that implies that there is some kind of noble difference between “taking” and “making” a picture.

So many rookie photographers say that they don’t know what to photograph, they don’t have any ideas of their own, so they simply copy what’s already been done. Don’t get me wrong- imitation is one of the ways we learn. Like almost every other photographer who came of age in the 60s and 70s, I wouldn’t have spent my working life working with a camera if I hadn’t first seen the work of Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander, and then spent years trying to reshoot their pictures.

He approached me from behind, disheveled just enough to not be mistaken for some regular guy in jeans and sneakers and a ball cap.  Slurring his words and carrying a mixed sixer (three bottles of Coors Light and three cans of something I didn’t recognize), he asked me if I was a photographer.

“I am”, I said.