About Me
I was born in 1958 in Berkeley, California, and grew up in the Bay Area and Los Angeles before moving to England, where I spent my high school years. After graduating from The American School in London, I returned to California and studied at UC Santa Cruz and later UC Berkeley, graduating from the latter with a degree in Humanities concentrating on post–World War II American art.
While at UC Berkeley, I discovered the work of photographers Robert Adams and Lee Friedlander and was deeply moved by their innovative ways of organizing space and reimagining how we see the world. This discovery proved transformative, leading me to dedicate myself fully to the medium of photography.
My work has been exhibited widely across the United States and in England and is held in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Palm Springs Art Museum, the UC Berkeley Art Museum, and the Northwest Center for Photography. I live in Berkeley, California, with my wife, artist Lisa Toby: lisatoby.com
About the Photographs
Rooted in the American West, I’m drawn to places where the natural world and the human-built world collide and coexist. My work is an attempt to understand that relationship—how we shape the land and, in turn, how it shapes us.
Much of my work circles around themes of inhabitation and abandonment, desire and neglect. I’m interested in the built environment not just as design or architecture but as a kind of residue—a record of intent. What we build reflects what we want, and often, what we fail to sustain. Whether I’m photographing in a remote desert community or a coastal enclave, I’m drawn to evidence of longing: for beauty, for shelter, for permanence, for control over nature. And I’m just as attuned to the moments where that longing falters.
I came to photography through an early and visceral relationship with landscape. Some of my first formative experiences were backpacking trips in the High Sierra with my father—moments of immersion in a wild, indifferent world. That early exposure planted a seed that has stayed with me: the idea that we are not separate from nature, but part of it, and often at odds with it. In my images, nature is never a neutral backdrop. It asserts itself—through light, wind, drought, or time. It resists containment. It reclaims what we leave behind.
Many of the places I photograph—Inyo County, the Mojave, Sea Ranch, the outer edges of Los Angeles—occupy a liminal space. They are either on the margins of development or in transition, caught between boom and decline, ambition and entropy. These places are rarely glamorous. But they are profoundly revealing. They show us who we are when we think no one is looking—what we value, how we age, where we find meaning, and where we lose it.
Ultimately, my photographs are not about documenting a specific place or time, though they do that too. They are about our search for connection—to land, to memory, to one another. I’m not interested in nostalgia, but I am interested in the tenderness that makes nostalgia possible. There’s something deeply human in our attempts to make a home, to hold onto beauty, to endure. Photography, for me, is a way of honoring that effort—even when it falls short.
What I hope emerges from the work is a kind of quiet empathy. A sense that these overlooked or ordinary places matter. That our environment—however humble—bears witness to our lives. And that in paying close attention to the world around us, we might better understand our place in it.