Photography became my primary skill in the visual arts when I was sixteen. I've learned from mentors and teachers: Lamar Philpot, Wallace Wilson, Evon Streetman, Randy Batista, and Laurie Hitzig. Alfred Stieglitz's vociferous defense of photography as an art form in itself appeals to me, though Stieglitz's subjective and sometimes vindictive determinations of who was in and who was out of serious artistic consideration does not. I prefer a mode of photography that puts most of the effort in up-front, before the shutter snaps, and reserve the use of many of the techniques Stieglitz approved...more