I thought about doing it at the time, but in the 80s I did not move to New York. It would have made sense as a career move to be closer to the center of things photography, but I did not do it. I really wanted to make good at home. If I had been in New York, I would not have been participating in my own regional culture and growing up with Portland. I would have been an outsider learning the ropes in a new place, and I probably would not have been contributing much to the visual conversation.

It is true that the pickings here in Portland photography-wise were pretty slim at the time. Back then, Portland was not exactly a happening place. It was colonized artistically by New York and other places where Big Things happened. Artists from New York came to Portland to bring the provincials up to speed on current trends; artists from Portland were not invited as guest stars to New York to enlighten and dazzle the New Yorkers.

Doing photography in Portland meant foregoing the support infrastructure of major institutions, prominent people, other ambitious young artists, and the market. Portland even now has a limited capacity to support artists, let alone artists working in photography. Back then however, Portland meant cheap rent and a unique place on the cusp of coming into its own. Better as well to be connected to a support network of family and friends.

I did not study photography at Yale for the some of the reasons I did not move to New York. When I considered doing an MFA I was already working independently, developing my skills and personal vision without having to jump through institutional hoops or please anyone. So if I am not part of the photography teaching / workshop ecosystem, you can put it down to my idealism and stubbornness. On the other hand I am happy not to be what in fishing terms we call a hatchery fish.

To me it did not make sense to study something formally that I was already learning independently, and indeed many photographers who have made important contributions to the medium have been self-taught. In my case I had learned to develop and print black and white photographs in high school and had taken a class in color photography in college. The history of the medium through the work of major photographers was available in books for free, notably at Powell’s Books in the photography section. My own book would not join them there however. When I took in A Second Year in France, Grandpa Powell asked me if it was personal work and when I said it was, he turned me down.

At the time I was fortunate in having a close friend, John Weber, who was also a photographer. We shared a darkroom for a number of years and had many conversations about art, languages, fishing, photography, and cooking, among other things. Having someone to challenge you and to bounce ideas off is invaluable.

A further reason that I chose not to study photography is that I was passionate about other subjects. I liked music, literature, and film and also languages. In college I studied Spanish and French and participated in two study abroad programs, one through Lewis and Clark College in Central America and another through Portland State in France. French in particular has become my second skin as I have lived in France long enough to assimilate, at least as much as you can when you are originally from somewhere else.

My background and experiences have informed my photography both in terms of subject and sensibility. The subject bit makes sense if you look at my work, but the sensibility part merits explanation: if you have participated in more than one culture, you know that in a different culture the folkways are different – that in another culture social dimensions and contexts have their own unique and particular patterns. The fact that you know the patterns means that you can access and read social situations like an insider, and in the end your photographer’s eye depends on your mind’s eye.

Ironically, France actually connected me to American photographers. I taught English at the University of Avignon from 1983 to 1985 and in the summers of 1984 and 1985 I worked as an interpreter at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, the photography festival in Arles. I worked with Bruce Davidson, Mary Ellen Mark, Christopher James, and Lewis Baltz.

Bruce Davidson was quite the raconteur, with very well-developed people skills. At one point during the week-long workshop he invited all of his students for a drink at a café on the square. He told stories and jokes and was impressed when I was able to translate well enough to make everyone laugh.

Mary Ellen Mark and I were not always on the same page. We did not clash directly, but my taste tends toward the restrained and understated and hers was the opposite, tending toward the dramatic. And I can still see her putting her fingers all over my carefully printed and matted photographs. Geez, I was shocked. I should have called her out, but it was in front of everyone and I bit my tongue.

Christopher James was great as a teacher, doing all of the one-on-one relationship-building that it takes to connect with students. He was personable and thoughtful and supportive.

Lewis Baltz was in his heyday as an art star, but he was personable and generous too. I think he was enjoying his discovery of Europe at the time. Baltz was impressed that I had heard him speak at the Art Institute of San Francisco and that I was able to quote him some lines that a reviewer had written about his book Park City regarding his “insistent detachment from, and detached insistence upon,” his subject. For my part Baltz’s slides from Park City (along with Duane Michals’ A Visit with Magritte) opened my eyes to the narrative potential of a sequence of photographs. What Baltz did with movement through space I set up as movement through time in A Second Year in France.