As a teenager, I spent countless hours, between library stacks, pouring over and admiring the works of other photographers. Years later, while attending community college, I bought my first professional film camera (Pentax K1000). In 2000, I started using a Nikon Coolpix 950 to do street photography.
You can buy any of my images as prints. Contact me directly before my store is launched.
I still enjoy walking around city streets taking pictures but I also the enjoy nature and macro photography, the waterfront, highways, twilight and night photography, rain on wet surfaces, and faces on lampposts.
I also create videos documenting my explorations.
I love painting older faces. As we age, gravity, time and life leaves indelible traces on our skin. We start to look like our parents, our grandparents, and their grandparents. It’s as if we travel back through time every time we look in the mirror.
The portrait gallery above chronicles my development with this medium including brief digressions and experiments that help to push my work in significant ways.
I am available for commissions so please contact me if you’d like to have a painting of yourself or a loved one. My paintings will be made available for online purchase soon.
-
Raised Arms
Unhoused citizens, living in Oakland, often build structures beneath the freeways in neighborhoods, where the homes of other disenfranchised citizens were destroyed to build those freeways.
-
Dark Tower
I was around eight years old when I first stepped into a tall, frighteningly swaying, apartment building. I remember darting to the window to see if the building was falling. Seven years of ferry crossings had not prepared me for a building that moved like a boat. As an adult, I learned the fear quelling facts about foundations and dampers, but I’m still unsettled every time I get into an elevator that goes higher than 4 floors.
-
Supermarket
Supermarkets, franchises and chain stores would like us to see the benevolence of their convenience above everything else. Above all, they want to be benign monopolies. They claim to do good for us because they are big and can save us money but I’ve yet to save money while spending it.
-
Smoke Shop
I wonder if cities would be a lot darker and less visually appealing at night if stores, like this one, with numerous LED signs didn’t exist? From my casual observations, East Bay suburban downtowns, are often dark and empty, and despite aspirations of safety, feel less hospitable.
-
LED Moon
Many of the streets in San Leandro are narrow with buildings packed tightly next to each other. People put things where they want and make changes to structures as needed. There is an unplanned organic elegance to the city. Many of the homes have barred windows and police patrol cars are in frequent.
-
Tiny Lenses
It can be restful to sit and watch drops of rain running down a window and I have no reason why. Maybe it’s the unpredictability of when the drops will run and the patterns paths they make? Maybe it’s the thousands of little lenses refracting the refracted images of the background? Maybe it’s just a chance to rest my mind? Whatever it is, I enjoy doing it.
-
Surveillance
When I was a hyper self-conscious teenager, I wouldn’t dare adjust any part of my clothing in public. Now, half a century later, I couldn’t care less who is looking at me and why. Self-consciousness means something else and feeling embarrassed faded when I became a parent. I also think, sidestepping electronic surveillance, we are looked at far less than we believe.
My fear, however, is that, when combined with Artificial Intelligence, being surveilled will become something harmful. Being seen will mean being judged. When sight, ideology and law collide, less powerful people can be hurt by more powerful people who control the systems of merit integral to freedom, survival and prosperity.
-
Power Lines
Despite all of the visual stimulation we live with in a city, things still catch my eye. This time, it was the red and white power lines, above me, at this traffic light. Power lines are never red and white so I had to stop and look.
-
Yellow Wall
I resemble this man and many of the other black men, standing outside of restaurants and stores in the Bay Area, who rely on acts of kindness from strangers to eat. He, and the other man on the other side of the drive-through, are silently hoping for Generosity to motivate someone to share.
When I look at these men, I see our collective failure, our fear, our self righteousness, our powerlessness, our selfishness, and our systems of exploitation. Some would have me believe, these people are in this position because of poor decision-making and laziness. For me, this man’s position, is indicative of a successful capitalist economy.
-
Corrugated Pizza
Corrugated steel will always represent affordable shelter to me. It’s a material that I saw frequently used for the roofs and walls of modest rural homes of in Guyana. My mind traveled back in time, and thousands of miles away when I saw this piece of metal in downtown Oakland. Instead of a roof and walls it bridged time and space for me.