Description

  Learn how to capture wonderful image on the streets of cities, towns or villages. Tell a story by capturing an image attracting the viewer’s attention.  Come and learnI will present work from several overseas street photography workshops to talk about the challenges and opportunities of photographing strangers in foreign cities whose language I rarely shared. Critical to these experiences, of course, were the structures of the workshops and the widely varied approaches, aesthetics, and values of the leaders, each of whom had a lasting influence on my work. I hope my talk does justice to their teaching. But what appears to be most lasting from these experiences – publications, portfolios, or prints hanging on a wall – are really just a reminder for me of something more enduring – the stories and lessons learned from strangers who gave me both a photograph and, more important, a moment of trust and understanding. There is no better reason to travel with a camera.Although photography has always been my true north, teaching and leadership in independent schools was my profession for over 40 years. I received a Ph.D. in English in 1976, found what I thought was a stopgap job teaching English at an independent high school in New Jersey, and stayed for 15 years. That led eventually to dean of faculty and academic dean positions in San Francisco and New York. But I always taught as well – English, philosophy or photography. In 2017, I retired as the academic dean of Collegiate School, a venerable K-12 boys school on the Upper West Side. Recently my wife and I completed our move from the city to full-time residence at our home in Ghent, NY.
When I left schools, I was eager to discover what a single focus on photography would yield and threw myself into a number of projects that had been simmering for years: the streets of New York, with a special focus on visitors to art museums; the carnys and 4-H kids at our local county fairs; an international look at sheep herding and showing, with local portraits juxtaposed to their counterparts in Idaho, England, and New Zealand; the developing portrait of a women’s hospital in southern Burundi where I volunteer as a photographer; and many street photography workshops in foreign cities where I learned to photograph strangers. Since then, I have been honored to have my work included in a variety of international, NYC, and local shows and to have been published in several print and online magazines, including Der Spiegel, Inspired Eye, and B&W Magazine.