I was born in Hagerstown, Maryland in 1958, and spent my early years in Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, Massachusetts, and Vermont. In 1971 my fatherŐs job transferred us to Brussels, and in 1975 we moved to England.

I began taking photographs in my last year of high school. My father had re-built his darkroom that year and he had given me a Leica camera and a book of Cartier BressonŐs photography. Even though my first photographs were mundane snapshots of my siblings and our surroundings, the camera, the darkroom, and the ability to create visual records of my experience thrilled me.

In 1977 I went to Middlebury College in Vermont where I specialized in printmaking and botany. During my senior year I proposed a project to study medicinal plants in the Andes and Himalayas and was awarded a $10,000 Watson Fellowship. This grant transformed my life as I traveled alone for three years in Peru and Nepal.

My botanical inquiries led me to a remote village on the eastern flank of the high Andes in Peru where I settled in a mud house with no running water or electricity. As I slowly learned to speak Spanish and Quechua, I befriended the locals and danced in their fiestas. I learned that the people interested me more than collecting and studying the medicinal plants. In Nepal I met a botanist and herbal doctor who tutored me six hours a day in the ancient healing science of Ayurveda, but as I wandered the back streets of Kathmandu, it was the visual poetry of ordinary life that most fascinated me.

I returned to Vermont after my travels, built a darkroom in a barn, and hung my photographs in a local café. After selling several prints and meeting a working fine art photographer, I finally let go of my ethno-botany career aspirations and decided to pursue photography full time.

In 1986 I moved to San Francisco where I set up a darkroom in the pantry of a one bedroom flat. After struggling through a Vermont winter with freezing pipes and chemicals, I was incredulous that the tap water ran at 68 degrees, a standard in photographic chemistry. I printed my work from Peru, and arranged an exhibition of my first set of 16 x 20 inch prints at a café in the Mission district. Several weeks later a local photography collector and gallery owner contacted me and hired me to work in his fledgling gallery. I pored over his collection of prints and books and started to learn about the world of fine art photography. On my days off I worked in the darkroom and dreamt of journeys past and future.

Since that time I have returned to Peru twice, to Asia four times, and I have made two trips to Cuba. My other passion is music, and since 1992 I have studied north Indian classical drumming with the tabla master Swapan Chaudhuri. In 2001 I moved to the small coastal town of Inverness, one hour north of San Francisco, where I now live with my wife and two children.