There are some photographic images which should only be seen and experienced in color. Not only with a blast of saturated color, but also in the subtle and sparing use of color or tones of color which helps define a place, a person an object, a moment and a sensory experience. This can be said about black and white images that work successfully using a limited yet infinite range of blacks, grey and white tones, where color simply doesn't help the photograph to be more engaging. Maybe it's because of the lack of color, that a black and white photograph can tell a different type of stripped down narrative. I don't find either to be a "better" tool for story telling, as each of these aspects of the photographic medium not only excels, but soars when used in the right conditions.

I started shooting and experimenting with color photography in the late 1970's early 1980s. As a young artist color film was too expensive to buy and process so I worked with bulk-loading black and white film into reusable film canisters. I had an appreciation for color images. I just wasn't able to play with it yet. Coming out of art school and choosing an inherently expensive medium created direct and sometimes conflicting economic decisions. Buying a quality camera and precision lenses forced me to make hard choices for what I considered necessary to create high-resolution 35mm film based images.

This decision to move towards color included using commercial labs to process color film and then be able to make color prints. Labs were a double-edged problem. I suffered from a lack of control over the nuanced decisions with the making of color prints. The techs in the darkrooms, who processed film and made the prints, were always a gamble to work with. I knew what I wanted from my images, and I was picky about color saturation and the substrates my work was to be printed on. To solve this, I eventually built a darkroom that could handle both B+W and color Cibachrome prints where I could reproduce the rich, bold colors I loved to shoot and the ability to control the printing to my own standards.

As my commercial photography career took off and I started generating a steady income, where I was regularly hired to shoot for multi-national hi-tech corporations, financial institutions, and editorial projects. Having that extra money to play with, I was able to shoot personal color work more freely without the worry of not being able to afford the film and processing. Later on, as ink jet technology and pigmented archival become affordable, on ce again helped me to make the jump out of chemistry based printing to larger archival pigment prints which I continue to work with on a daily basis.

The images and subject matter in this portfolio represent my early color photography, of which many of the subjects I continue to add to some forty-plus years later.

I find it fascinating to see some of these images for their first time.I hope you enjoy this series as much as I do.

If you have comments, feel free to email me with your thoughts.