RW- Brief Photographic Biography
As a young man I wanted to be a photographer like the great Cartier Bresson who, with Robert Capa, started Magnum Photos in New York and Paris. I worked as an assistant to the Magnum photographers for a couple of years and began to get my own assignments with Time and Newsweek, Signature Magazine, Metropolitan Sunday Newspapers and many others. My photographs were included in the Magnum book project, America in Crisis edited by Michael Levitas. I travelled widely and my pictures of Semana Santa in Sevilla were featured in a large spread in Signature Magazine. Some of those pictures were also featured in the Leica Manual of that year. I also was the still photographer for two movies, “Boys in the Band” filmed in NYC and “Bridge in the Jungle” filmed in Mexico with John Huston and Katy Jurado among others. I did a lot of this kind of work during those years as well as some photography for advertising projects and some fashion. And, I photographed Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s March just after he was killed and many of the marches against the Vietnam War including the Democratic and Republican conventions of 1968.
I moved to the country, to New Hampshire, to fix up an old house and I started a photography program at the New Hampton School, a good boarding school in the Lakes District. I did this for 3 years before travelling across the country to Yosemite National Park to study with Ansel Adams. That changed my direction and soon I was in the graduate program in photography at Rhode Island School of Design studying with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind among others. After graduation I started a photographic publishing company with entrepreneur Robert Tow and our first project- the coffee table book “Harry Callahan: Color” won the best illustrated book award for that year from the US Graphic Arts Association.
There are many Google references to it under my name. In 1994 I became the Art Department Chair at Charles Wright Academy in Tacoma, Washington. During the 8 years I was there we built a two million dollar art center, added a faculty member which brought us up to six, and quadrupled the budget. Part of the facility was a first rate darkroom where 12 people could work comfortably. I taught photography as well as painting and drawing and art history. When I went to Bangladesh in 2002 I started a program of digital photography and video which is still going strong.I have studied with some of the best photographers of the last century and learned from them. From pin hole cameras to 8 x 10 view cameras, from the zone system to lighting with strobe and studio techniques I have done it. Last summer I was one of two official photographers for Free Speech.Org. They sponsored the Conference on Free Speech and Media Reform in Minneapolis so I got photograph Bill Moyers, Dan Rather, Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein, Phil Donahue, and many others. It was fun, like old times!