I arrived in New York at the end of 1966 and soon got a job as the night janitor at Café Figaro in the West Village. A couple of weeks later I enrolled in a six week photography course at the New York Institute of Photography which at that time was located on West 34th Street across from the Empire State Building. I had never owned a camera but having seen the movie Blow-Up shortly before leaving London I thought that photography might be more interesting than my fledgling career in market research. There were several good teachers at the photography school and after six weeks I bought my first camera and set about becoming a street photographer in the East Village while spending many evenings photographing the musicians at Slug’s in The Far East where the Sun Ra Arkestra played every Monday night. My first published photo was on a Sun Ra album. I applied to take a course at The New School taught by Lisette Model who, after looking through a stack of photos I brought to the interview, offered me the course for free if I assisted her in the classroom. Lisette later urged me to pursue a career as a photographer but it would take a few years to achieve that ambition.

In 1969 I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan and gradually by the mid 1970’s had started to connect with a few of the publications that would be my mainstay. I started a five decade association with the New York Times, and also started working with Business Week for whom I was soon doing up to fifty assignments a year. Having become known as a Detroit area photographer I subsequently worked regularly for Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report, Fortune, Forbes, Der Spiegel, Stern and a host of other publications. I was represented by Rhode Island based Picture Group, and later by Saba Press Photos and Corbis.