Photography has been a lifetime addiction for me and a savior at the same time. My first camera was a box camera that used 616 roll film size that was hard to find in the 50s and impossible to find now. My hands shook when I bought my first precision camera, a 35mm single lens reflex for $160.00 brought with money I made cleaning bricks with a hatchet.
I had my own darkroom at the age of 15 and even if it was in the kitchen at night with the lights out it worked, until a car would drive down the country road I lived on, fogging my film or print. After high school I enlisted in the U.S. Navy and became a rated Navy photographer in 1965. It was when aboard the USS Ranger Attack Aircraft Carrier that my work was published in something other than a high school year book for the first time. A Saturday Evening Post magazine story titled “I Escaped from a Red Prison” featured two photographs I had made of the recovery of a Navy pilot that had been shot down and captured by the North Vietnamese Army and held as a POW.
Photography gave me the discipline and job skills that have carried me throughout life. Although there were times that I had no equipment or I thought I was finished with photography I was always drawn back in to its grasp as it is not finished with me. The last fifteen years I have been documenting Reno Nevada.
