They say every Chicagoan eventually becomes an architecture photographer.

I grew up in northwest Indiana. On the drives in, my face stayed pressed to the car window, counting cornices past the steel mills. I built with LEGO bricks at home, so I already knew a building was a stack of decisions somebody made one at a time. From the back seat I'd pick one and quickly read it up from the sidewalk to the roofline before the next one took its place.

I started my career as a U.S. Army photojournalist during the transition from film to digital. Deployed to Bosnia and Croatia in 1995 and 1996, I turned my 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. Photographers were just beginning to call that work warchitecture, and I was among the first doing it.

Thirty years on, I'm still looking for what everyone else drives past. These days I live in a 1910 Victorian in San Francisco's Bayview, where I'm at work on a book documenting the neighborhood's murals.

My work's been published by the American Institute of Architects, Archinect, Hoodline, Le Monde, and New York Magazine, 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.