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 I love to tell stories.
In grade school and high school I performed in the holiday pageants and school plays and sang in the church choir.
In college, I majored in theater. My interest in telling stories moved from being in the spotlight to backstage as a director and designer. I thought a lifetime in the theater was ahead of me but the tumultuous politics of the 1960’s moved me in a different direction.  I volunteered for the Peace Corps and bought a camera to record my experiences as a teacher in Sierra Leone in west Africa.
On my way home from Africa, I stopped in the Carney Islands to buy a camera at the duty-free port—a Nikon F. I had gotten hooked on telling stories with photographs but I knew nothing about the craft. So I signed up for a correspondence course and set up a darkroom in a 4’ x 5’ laundry room. My first efforts to make money with a camera combined my theater experience with photography as I took pictures of dance and theater performances and sold 8x10’s to the dancers and actors.
What intrigued me about this work was anticipating the key storytelling moments and capturing them on film.
 In 1976, Merrill Mahaffey, a landscape painter, asked me to travel with him around Arizona as he gathered images for a new suite of paintings.
As we traveled together I learned to see the land, to see how light reveals shapes and colors I had never imagined. And I became interested in the story behind the rocks. How did they get here? What forces created these beautiful places? I had a new story to learn and to tell. So I’ve spent much of the last 25 years with my cameras in the wild places of the Southwest waiting for the moments when all the elements come together to tell our planet's story.
My story telling has taken the shape of a series of photography projects. In 1979, I spent a month backpacking the length of the Verde River in central Arizona.  The Verde River Walk was an attempt to literally follow the course of a natural force to find out how it shaped the land.
What followed were three projects on the dominate river of the Southwest, the Colorado. I produced two portfolios and a CD-ROM project on the Grand Canyon where two billion years of the Earth’s history are laid bare. Traversing layer after layer of rocks when descending into the canyon has brought me to a paradox: witnessing the results of the forces that have shaped our planet as it has evolved from a cloud of dust over an incomprehensible stretch of time makes me feel insignificant. I am not even a blink of an eye in that scheme. Yet the current state of evolution has made it possible for me to see this place. The evolution of technology has enabled me to record what I see and to show it to others.
In 1994 I set out to create a new portfolio to tell the story of the geography of Arizona. I went to some places I had photographed before and sought out new places that filled in the missing chapters. After three years of work on this story, I created the Rockscapes portfolio and an exhibition in three parts corresponding to the shape of Arizona: desert, highlands and plateau.
 I am starting on a new project which will carry me beyond Arizona to the Great Basin, the Rockies and the edge of the Great Plains. My next story is US Route 89 which begins at Nogales on the Mexican border and wanders north through Arizona, Utah, a corner of Idaho, Wyoming and ends in Montana at the Canadian border. Along the way it passes through or near six national parks and numerous national monuments and national forests. The narrative of highway 89 will also include the human history starting with the original Americans and including the Spanish Conquistadors and Missionaries; the mountain men and soldiers who opened the West; and the ranchers, farmers and miners who settled it.
To follow along with the story of US Route 89, come back to this web site for the latest news and pictures. I hope you will enjoy the journey as much as I will in taking it. It will be a fascinating story which I’m sure will be full of beauty and adventure.
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