Allan attended school for an engineering degree, but he’s self-taught in photography and acting. He married in college, began a promising career at Hewlett-Packard in Northern California, and then had his mind blown five years later by a week of theatergoing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He’d never been on stage before, but after seeing these superb play productions he decided to give acting a try. Directly following his return from Ashland in 1980, he auditioned for a college production of Twelfth Night and landed a small speaking role. There was no turning back.

The right-brain explosion ignited by theatre led simultaneously to a discovery of monochrome photography. Not long after, he jettisoned the engineering career and the marriage, opened a photo studio, and auditioned for professional theatre work in Berkeley, where he was hired by the California Shakespeare Festival. Thirty years later and living in the Seattle area after moving north in 2002, he is acting professionally and making photographs. And he's finally retired from the technical writing and editing that paid the rent.

The possibilities for monochrome continue to fascinate and stimulate him. It’s likely that watching classic black & white films and television programs (such as The Twilight Zone) as a child had a major impact on his imagination and sensibilities that no amount of color media could later lessen. His friends in Seattle’s theater community appear (often obscurely) in some of his pictures, and also provide production assistance. But for several years now he's been focused on landscapes and cityscapes.