California including visits to Mexico and Europe,
1967 through 1972

At the beginning of my tertiary art-education I enjoyed taking photographs of people, places, things that attracted my attention. Later, I became interested in exploring the medium more intensively and I began to make images that altered photography’s documentary reality.

While a BA art student at San Francisco State I was attracted to printmaking, sculpture, and photography. I have always enjoyed making things and c1967 I made The Lovers an image involving my wife, Nancy, and myself.  Structurally this image was made using two consecutive 35mm negatives – a method I borrowed from Ray K. Metzker. This was my first preconceived, constructed image.

In the SF Bay Area, everyone involved with photography lived with the pervading influence of famous local artists like Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and Wynn Bullock. During the 1960s new attitudes and trends in US photography emerged with artists like Jerry Uelsmann, Duane Michals, Ralph Gibson, Arthur Tress, Robert Heinecken, and the ‘social landscape’ artists like Lee Friedlander, Gary Winogrand, Danny Lyon, Bruce Davidson, and Diane Arbus.

During my postgraduate two years, 1968-69, the SF State campus, in response to Vietnam War protests, felt like a place under siege from the police. I had the honour to work as the assistant for Imogen Cunningham (in her 80s) when she taught an undergraduate photography class. Imogen was against the war and always wore a peace sign. In June 1969, I achieved my MA a few weeks before Neil Armstrong did his ‘giant leap for mankind’. I was invited to teach a summer class in photography at SF State and by the new academic year, I had a teaching position at College of Marin where I had begun my tertiary studies. 

Around this time my marriage to Nancy ended. In 1970 I met Gael, an Australian, and her two children, Rachel, and Toby. Gael was in the process of a divorce and our relationship evolved slowly. As our relationship became more serious, Gael and her children became woven into my imagery; it was inevitable, or it felt that way.

After graduation, I became a founding member of the Visual Dialogue Foundation along with two lecturers from the course, Jack Welpott and Don Worth, a local artist/teacher, Oliver Gagliani, and a few ex-students including Judy Dater, Lee Rice, Mike Bishop, John Spence Weir, Mike Harris, and Charles Roitz. Later members included Linda Connor, Robert Forth, and Steven Soltar.

The group had a significant influence in the SF Bay Area and produced a portfolio that sold to some major art galleries and art museums in the US and Europe – including MOMA, New York and MOMA, San Francsico.

In 1971, with our friend, Wendy Sanchez, we travelled to Mexico, five people crowded into my hippy van. This was my first experience beyond the US border. At times, Mexico was a cultural shock, at other times a fascinating and joyous place to be. We often felt vulnerable, but Wendy spoke fluent Spanish and that helped immensely. After a few days in Mazatlán, Wendy returned home and we drove inland working our way north through the mountains to the Texas border and back home. In Texas I saw my first dead person – a road accident.

At home, I found that I had won a prize at the Arles Festival in France with three photographs I had submitted for a competition titled, L’Objet. The letter included an invitation to attend the festival the following year.

We were now living at the edge of Tomalas Bay in the rural village of Inverness. We rented a log house on a couple acres in the pines where I set up a darkroom. We lived a rural life, and I was commuting 45 minutes to Kentfield where I was teaching.

In 1972 we had a few weeks in Europe starting with the Arles Festival. We rented a house there in the village and experienced a taste of living in Provence.

In a Roman-built, stone building situated along the Rhône River, Bruce Davidson was showing some of the view camera photographs that he had taken in New York’s Harlem. Lucien Clergue was directing the Festival that year. I was fortunate to meet the French photographer (a personal hero) J.H. Lartigue. Like a dream, we were all together there in the same environment that had inspired Vincent van Gogh.

Gael, the kids and I drove north to Switzerland to visit the daughter of a neighbour in California. We also spent time in England with Gael’s sister and her family near Cambridge. Late in our stay, Gael and I had a brief holiday at small B&B farm near the border of Wales and the town of Hay-on-Wye.

This text is intended to offer a backdrop for the artworks in this gallery. Hopefully the images create more questions than answers. If so, they will have done their job!