"To what shall I compare thee that I may comfort thee?" --Lamentations 2:13

"Pray you never learn just how good it can be to see another face." -- Interstellar

2006: My overarching goal in portraiture, perhaps perversely, is to find ways to make other people more real: to encourage a viewer to consider the face of a stranger, and to really look. What is it we imagine we see there, in the Other? Ultimately, we are looking only at ourselves. But in the process, we practice training our eyes and hearts to look more deeply at the others around us We consider their natures, we speculate about their stories, their happinesses and sufferings, and in so doing we practice generating compassion in ourselves. One cannot really consider the reality of another person, I think, without accruing some kind of responsibility for them.

I think of my portrait photography as a kind of political activism.

1st Place, 2005 Flickies, Excellence in Social Documentary / Activist Photography

1st Place, 2005 Flickies, Excellence in Political Art Photography

2nd Place, 2005 Flcikies, Excellence in Portrait / People Photography

2nd Place, 2005 Flickies, Excellence in Street Photography

And yes, I DO want to take your picture. Contact me!

MY GUIDES:

"Woe to him seeks to please rather than to appall."

--Herman Melville, Moby Dick

"If a way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst."

--Rainer Marie Rilke

"Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance."

--G.K. Chesterton

"It is not enough to decorate the world, the point is to influence it."

--Cornelius Cardew

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."

- Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu

"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."

- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people."

--V, in "V for Vendetta"

"The ink of scholars is weighed on the Day of Judgement with the blood of martyrs and the ink of scholars out-weighs the blood of martyrs."

--The Prophet Mohammed

"We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words - "freedom", "dictatorship", "liberty" - will not be forgotten again. Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene someone saying "I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the black shirts to parade again in the Italian squares." Life is not that simple. Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances - every day, in every part of the world."

--Umberto Eco

"I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality."

--Dr. Martin Luther King

"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."

--Paulo Freire, educator (1921-1997)

"Art is lies that tell the truth." - Pablo Picasso

"I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it."

--Marshall McLuhan

"Call it art and you can say what you like."

--Robert Wyatt

"The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths."

--Eddie Adams

"Remember: even if you have been dead before, you are not dead now."

--Fakeproject.com

"You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it's just teeth."

— Chuck Palahniuk

"Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness." -- Ned Hanauer

"Are these paths only detours, detours from you to you? But they are, among how many others, the path on which language becomes voice. They are encounters, paths from a voice to a listening. You, natural paths, outlines for existence perhaps, a kind of homecoming. I am looking for all this with my imprecise, because nervous, finger on a map - a child's map, I must admit. None of these places can be found. They do not exist. But I know where they ought to exist, especially now, and... I find something else."

--Paul Celan, THE MERIDIAN

"All media of communication begin as links or bridges between people and things and end as substitutes for the things with which they had originally established new contact." --MARSHALL MACLUHAN

"The central problem is this: How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they discover themselves to be 'hosts' of the oppressor can they contribute to the midwifery of their liberating pedagogy. As long as they live in the duality in which to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is impossible. The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for their critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization."

--Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

"I do not believe the future will belong to those who are content with the present. I do not believe the future will belong to those who are cynics or to those who stand on the sidelines. The future will belong to those hwo have passion and to those who are willing to make a personal committment to make our country better."

--Senator Paul Wellstone, shortly before his assassination

"Appearances often are decieving."

--Aesop, "The Wolf in Sheep`s Clothing"

"Nemo aliquid recognoscat, nos mentimur omnia." (Let not any one take these thing to himself, they are all but fictions)

--from "Democritus to the Reader", introduction to "The Anatomy of Melancholy" by Robert Burton.

"To say that the camera cannot lie is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are practiced in its name." --Marshall MacLuhan

"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter."

--Oscar Wilde

"They want to see their picture of you and if they don't see their picture of you they're very upset."

--William S. Burroughs

"If the European eventually brings himself to hate his own face, it will be because it is reflected by an Arab."

--Jean-Paul Sarte, La Question

"When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us. I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory. If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man."

--Harold Pinter on accepting the 2005 Nobel prize for Literature

"There is no place left where people can discern the realities which concern them, because they can never lastingly free themselves from the crushing presence of media discourse and of the various forces organized to relay it... Unanswerable lies have succeeded in eliminating public opinion, which first lost the ability to make itself heard and then very quickly dissolved altogether... Once one controls the mechanism which operates the only form of social verification to be fully and universally recognized, one can say what one likes... Spectacular power can similarly deny whatever it wishes to, once, or three times over, and change the subject: knowing full well there is no danger of riposte, in its own space or any other. To this list of the triumphs of power we should add, however, one result which has proved negative: once the running of the state involves a permanent and massive shortage of historical knowledge, that state can no longer be led strategically." --Guy DeBord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, pp. 13-20

"He was a terribly bad hobgoblin, a goblin of the very wickedest sort and, in fact, he was the devil himself. One day the devil was in a very good humor because he had just finished a mirror which had this peculiar power: everything good and beautiful that was reflected in it seemed to dwindle to almost nothing at all, while everything that was worthless and ugly became most conspicuous and even uglier than ever. In this mirror the loveliest landscapes looked like boiled spinach, and the very best people became hideous, or stood on their heads and had no stomachs. Their faces were distorted beyond any recognition, and if a person had a freckle it was sure to spread until it covered both nose and mouth. "That's very funny!" said the devil. If a good, pious thought passed through anyone's mind, it showed in the mirror as a carnal grin, and the devil laughed aloud at his ingenious invention. All those who went to the hobgoblin's school-for he had a school of his own-told everyone that a miracle had come to pass. Now, they asserted, for the very first time you could see how the world and its people really looked. They scurried about with the mirror until there was not a person alive nor a land on earth that had not been distorted. Then they wanted to fly up to heaven itself, to scoff at the angels, and our Lord. The higher they flew with the mirror, the wider it grinned. They could hardly manage to hold it. Higher they flew, and higher still, nearer to heaven and the angels. Then the grinning mirror trembled with such violence that it slipped from their hands and fell to the earth, where it shattered into hundreds of millions of billions of bits, or perhaps even more. And now it caused more trouble than it did before it was broken, because some of the fragments were smaller than a grain of sand and these went flying throughout the wide world. Once they got in people's eyes they would stay there. These bits of glass distorted everything the people saw, and made them see only the bad side of things, for every little bit of glass kept the same power that the whole mirror had possessed. A few people even got a glass splinter in their hearts, and that was a terrible thing, for it turned their hearts into lumps of ice. Some of the fragments were so large that they were used as window panes-but not the kind of window through which you should look at your friends. Other pieces were made into spectacles, and evil things came to pass when people put them on to see clearly and to see justice done. The fiend was so tickled by it all that he laughed till his sides were sore. But fine bits of the glass are still flying through the air, and now you shall hear what happened."

--Hans Christian Andersen, Sneedronningen

"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding."

--Marshall McLuhan

"[Pat Robertson's call to assassinate Hugo Chavez] is a perfect illustration of how dark the intentions of this movement is and how, if we don’t begin to stand up and fight back, if we believe that these people can be domesticated and brought into the political arena where they will act responsibly, we’re very, very naive. And we should all sit down, and as unpalatable as it is, and listen to Christian -- so-called Christian radio and television to see the kinds of messages of hate and exclusion that they are spewing out over the airwaves."

--Chris Hedges on American Christian Fascism, Democracy Now, Feburary 20, 2007

"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say. "

--Marshall McLuhan

"Tell people something they know already and they will thank you for it. Tell them something new and they will hate you for it."

--George Monbiot

"A Southern physician, Samuel Cartwright, argued that many of the slaves -- in America -- suffered from a form of mental illness, which he called 'drapetomania', diagnosed as the uncontrollable urge to escape from slavery. In the second half of the 20th-centruy, this illness, in the Third World, has usually been called communism."

--William Blum

"Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths."

--Eddie Adams, Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist

"I know some photographs that are extraordinary in their power and conviction, but it is difficult in photography to overcome the superficial power or subject; the concept and statement must be quite convincing in themselves to win over a dramatic and compelling subject situation. "-- Ansel Adams

"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."

~ Denis Diderot

"The reason for the ongoing conflict between Israel/Palestine is not because Israel occupies parts of the West Bank and Gaza and is not willing to give them back. The reason we have the conflict is the Zionist ideology. This is where it starts and this is where it ends. As long as the vast majority of Jews in Israel subscribes to this ideology in its present interpretation, I'm afraid we will not see peace and reconciliation coming to this land."

--Ilan Pappe

"Now they're planning the crime of the century, well what will it be?

Read all about their schemes and adventuring, it's well worth the fee.

So roll up and see, as they rape the universe,

How they've gone from bad to worse!

Who are these men of lust, greed, and glory?

Rip off the masks and let's see. But that's not right - oh no, what's the story?

There's you and there's me, That can't be right"

--Supertramp

sdug bsngal ’dor ’dod sems yod kyang /

sdug bsngal nyid la mngon par rgyug /

bde ba ’dod kyang gti mug pas /

rang gi bde ba dgra ltar ’joms /

Although beings wish to avoid misery,

They actually run toward misery itself.

Although they want to be happy, out of ignorance

They destroy their own happiness as they would an enemy.

--Shantideva, Boddhisattvacharyavattara

Where it all begins...