Statement
A severe skiing accident during high school almost cost me a leg. Somehow I knew that leg might not be with me forever. After college, in 1971 I hiked more than a thousand miles in the Rockies and found my first post-graduate job caring for a herd of goats at a remote monastery in northern New Mexico. This gave me ample time for art—inspired by the beauty of nature and guided by my thesis work with The Thinking Eye by Paul Klee.
I arrived in Telluride, Colorado in 1974, renovated an old warehouse and opened a vegetarian bar and dancehall that allowed me to ski more than 100 days a year, with added time in the backcountry wearing out many boots, backpacks and sleeping bags. An inherited early Nikon F began revealing the possibilities of photography. After traveling around the world and shooting 200 rolls of Tri-X, I was diagnosed in the fall of 1979 as having an aggressive osteosarcoma and given a 15 to 30% chance of five-year survival. I had a credit card and knew I did not want to die without a Leica. I bought a second-hand M4 with a 35mm lens that I used through chemotherapy and up to the moment I entered surgery for the amputation of my right leg. My parents and my M4 were there when I awoke, shy one leg. As the door closed on my old life, photography was opening a new one.
In the fall of 1981 I mentioned to my friend Paco Grande that I wanted to spend the winter in Peru and Bolivia shooting more Tri-X. He allowed as how he would come along and keep an eye on me. Paco is blind and I wondered out loud what it would be like, traveling as the lame and the blind. “Easy,” he said, “you steer, I’ll push.” That worked and the path kept moving me forward. I spent four months in China during 1983-4 as it first opened to foreigners. Once a crowd of perhaps a hundred people gathered to watch me adjust my artificial leg… too long a story for here. Each of us has limits, and also unique possibilities.
Thanks to a great photo editor at the Christian Science Monitor, I discovered the low paying but lofty and remarkably independent position of “stringer.” This gave me license to travel, following my nose as an artist while giving them “first look” to choose what they could use for journalistic purposes. Up and running, I covered a lot of ground on one leg.
In 1986, landing in San Francisco from an extended trip in China and Tibet, the friend who picked me up took me directly to Palo Alto to meet some people. Three days later I was in a mountain village in Mexico photographing for a book of low-tech rehab for health workers and parents of “underserved” disabled children. The foundation later paid for me to go to UCLA to learn prosthetics and then set up a workshop to make legs and turn skillful but “uneducated” folks into prosthetists. I made twelve trips to Ajoya, Sinaloa during the next five years and shot hundreds of rolls of film of everything from birth to death in that remote village. As a result, in 1991 I was the invited guest of the Cambodian government during a time when the country was closed to foreigners. Living in Phnom Penh teaching prosthetics, I also got to photograph a unique moment before global capitalism rolled over the Khmer Rouge-devastated shell of the last truly grand imperial city built in the twentieth century.
Without my “disability” it’s unlikely I would have traveled so widely gathering over 200,000 images of people and culture, learned and taught prosthetics to serve a greater good, started an adaptive ski program, co-founded a children’s theater company, or managed to marry a wonderful woman and raise a remarkable child.
On a long train journey I once shared my story with stranger who had an interesting response that I like to think sums up life in the arts: “It may sound shiftless, but it’s not trifling.”
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Evening at the confluence of the Tonle Sap and Mekong Rivers
silver gelatin print
16" x 20"
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Revived School of Traditional Khmer Music and Dance
silver gelatin print
16" x 20"
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Diving into an Abandoned Olympic Pool
silver gelatin print
16" x 20"
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Restoration of a Bhuddist Painting in Temple damaged by the Khmer Rouge
silver gelatin print
16" x 20"
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Morning Rush Hour in Phnom Penh
silver gelatin print
16" x 20"
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Leftover Russian Foreign Aid in the Form of a School of Circus Arts
silver gelatin print
16" x 20"
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Contemporary Graffiti
silver gelatin print
16" x 20" |
Enlarged Document Photograph of Khmer Rouge Imprisoned Woman and Child
silver gelatin print
16" x 20"
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