1) How do/did you begin working in photography?

Although I started making photographs as a kid, my aspirations were to be a sports photographer working for Sports Illustrated. (I was a huge fan of S.I. photographer Neil Leifer.) At 18, I got a job in the National Football League as an asst. team photographer. Later I also covered the 1981 and 1982 Tour de France. It was a blast. (By the way, Lance Armstrong is the greatest athlete of the century!)  However around the same time I discovered the work of Memphis color photographer, William Eggleston. I was intrigued and mystified by the fact that someone could make such compelling pictures about seemingly nothing. My interest changed from wanting to make sports images to wanting to make my own images.

I ended up attending the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. I studied with color photographer Jim Dow, Bill Burke, Bonnie Donahue, and Elaine O'Neil.

I took a detour through corporate America for some time but eventually I realized that I just had to start photographing again, whatever it meant for my life.

I know this is sounding like a long and winding road, I guess it is, but I am coming around to answering your question. It was 1988 and I began visiting New Orleans cemeteries. We have a lot of them, all different and interesting because many crypts are above ground due to the fact New Orleans is below sea level. This led to a series called The Reposed, which seemed to be a great metaphor. I felt the pictures transcended the mere objects. At the time, I was going through a divorce, which is like a death. That work became a monograph published by LSU Press in 1999.

As I kind of concluded that series of work, I began to drift off into photographing tableaus and shrines of popular cultural icons like, Elvis, M.L. King, Malcolm X, and JF Kennedy. I called the series Gone but not Forgotten. It was a step removed from the cemetery series but still related in some way, at least in my mind. Next came Cryptography or what I had originally called, Symbols of Commitment. I was making a visual connection with the idea of commitment whether it is a relationship or something else. At the time, I was entering a new relationship and contemplating marriage.

Next came a series called Homefront. I guess you can kind of tell how I go about this now? First the relationship, then the house? :-). But seriously, I had been introduced to Bill Owens’ work, Suburbia, and I was taken by the notion of how people express who they are by what they drive, the clothes they wear and how they adorn their homes. Some images from Homefront were published in the WW Norton book, A New Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South.

I am now printing a series entitled Perilous Pilgrimage, about children. Yes, we had a son about 5 years ago, but I began thinking about life as a long journey for kids and how the road can be bumpy at times. I hope to show this work at the New Orleans Museum of Art in the fall of this year.

Overall my work is ever growing and evolving. Most recently I am getting away from working in series, to the point where I am just making images. I hope all this makes sense?

2) What photographers and painters are you influenced by?

Influences? Well obviously Eggleston as I mentioned, but certainly Clarence John Laughlin, a great New Orleans photographer who has somewhat been overlooked by bigger names. Bill Owens, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, too many… I love Milton Avery’s work, its flatness and its condensing of the subject to just the necessary elements and details. I also love Edward Hopper for the emotional impact of his scenes. Ralston Crawford is an artist I really admire; he worked so effectively as a painter, print maker and photographer. His images of New Orleans Jazz funerals are really incredible.

3) What moment is the most satisfying for you as an artist, when you make the work or show it?

While working, sometimes you just know you have made something that will be worth looking at. Other times I struggle through the process. At times I see well and it just flows, while other times it is like running up hill against the wind. I get great satisfaction from having my pictures see, although I hate attending openings.

I also really love the internet, and am happy to have found the rat! The fact that I can have a website and anyone, anywhere, at any time with access to the web can find me or my work is incredible.

4) Is there an overarching conceptual basis for your work?  Or do you feel you are more formally oriented?

I work intuitively. I work on issues and themes that seem to be relevant in my life at a certain moment, and try to translate that into the subjective process of going out in to the world and choosing what is included and what is excluded in the picture. I want to try and condense it down to the relevant stuff. The other interesting thing to me about photography and this process, is how the subject takes on a life of its own - there is some kind of energy revealed.  

5) All of your work is in a very strong dialogue with popular culture, both verbally and visually.... Is the relationship positive, negative, or something that you are merely pointing at?

I don’t think much consciously of popular culture, but I am sure it permeates my ideas because I am so exposed to it, as is everyone. Is it good? I guess so if, you, others, or me do more or better because of it. I think I am just pointing at it, without much judgment - good, bad or indifferent. It’s interesting because viewers bring their preconceived notions about things, art, etc. to the work, so they will respond to it through whatever color glass they are wearing.

6) What are a couple of your favorite movies and TV shows? Why?

That is so tough. Wim Wenders Until the End of the World- although it really should be two movies. Blow Up, The Godfather, Midnight Cowboy, Secrets and Lies, and most recently Garden State are a few of many, many movie faves. I love small, quiet little independent movies.

I love reality TV. I am such a voyeur, or at least I want to be voyeur, if there is such a thing. I am so curious about people, how they think, work, live, etc., at a step removed.

7) What are you advertising, do you think? (This is not a trick question but a different way of getting at the idea of what you value.)

I am advertising what I see in the world and how I see my world. I guess it is pretty egotistical to think others will think anything of the way I see or what I see, so that is really why I make the pictures for me first and foremost. That is why I feel it is a privilege and an honor to capture an audience’s attention for a moment, a picture, or show or two. I am not of the grand issue, grand question, grand answer school of photography. Just like my taste in films, my issues are smaller, more intimate and closer to my heart and home.