Since encountering the art of the late 1960s and early 70s, I’ve wanted to apply what I could learn from looking at and thinking about art to my personal photographic projects. In 1976 I completed graduate studies at UCLA where I worked with painters even though my medium was exclusively photography. I think of my studio photographs from the mid-70s to early 80s as a kind of later-day pictorialism. Like the turn-of-the-Twentieth Century Pictorialists, I modeled my photographs after paintings—in their case sentimental Impressionism, in my case Post-painterly Abstraction, Minimalist and Pop art.

In the late 1970s and early 80s I carried a 35mm camera with three lenses and photographed in color in Los Angeles. Although I didn’t speak of it this way at the time, I sought out subjects that I could photograph as if works of art. I now think of these color photographs as prologue to my present project, The Dada Connection.

After a hiatus, my enthusiasm for photography was restored by a combination of digital technology and wanting to photograph certain artworks. First was a digital collage project, Auduboniana, for which I placed Audubon’s pre-photographic paintings of birds into my photographs of post-industrial architecture.

Next came an on-going, art-historical project about connections among artists, presented as sets of photographs in which artists refer to or are connected with other artists. The photographs describe a network in which each artist’s work leads to another artist and then to other artists and so on. By presenting a thread of connections among artists, Artist to Artist proposes an alternate kind of photographic sequence that is meant to give form to an art-historical narrative and to illuminate ones experience of these artists’ works and lives.

Another recent and ongoing project furthers this investigation: The Dada Connection extends the idea of connected art and artists to a set of my original photographs, here linked to the perennial Dada theme of poetically inspired nonsense masquerading as sense. Such images have long been part of my photographic practce, demonstrating the extraordinary possibilities for interpreting straight forward pictures of ordinary stuff.