They say every Chicagoan eventually becomes an architecture photographer.

I grew up in northwest Indiana, building with LEGO bricks, so I already knew a building was a stack of decisions somebody made one at a time.

On every drive into the city, my face stayed pressed to the car window, counting cornices past the steel mills. From the back seat I'd pick one building and read it from sidewalk to roofline before the next one took its place.

Then the Army handed me a camera. I became a U.S. Army photojournalist just as the craft was moving from film to digital.

In 1995 and 1996 I deployed to Bosnia and Croatia and turned that camera on the buildings the civil war had torn open. A shelled facade holds two things at once: the record of what happened, and the evidence of what stood there before.

That work made me one of the first photographers doing what people were only beginning to call warchitecture. It also set the course for everything after, because I've never stopped looking for what everyone else drives past.

Thirty years on, I live in a 1910 Victorian in San Francisco's Bayview, where I'm launching MONUMENTAL PHOTOS, the archive of built space.

My work has been published by Bloomberg, NPR, New York Magazine, Le Monde, and the American Institute of Architects. It has been used by San Francisco Heritage and Stanford's Bill Lane Center for the American West, and viewed more than 12 million times on Flickr. I'm a member of American Photographic Artists and a lifetime member of the National Press Photographers Association.