Writing coach/ tutor/ editor, blues musician, writer, artist & photographer....

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SHORT BIO, 2/14

A Long Islander and a New Yorker, with roots in Massachusetts, after graduate school Bill settled in the sunny state of North Carolina to teach American literature and writing… and to raise a family; as a teacher he sponsored and edited his high school’s literary magazine for over two decades.

While teaching he pursued a freelance writing career as a music journalist, publishing over a hundred previews and reviews for the Greensboro News & Record and for a variety of weekly entertainment magazines. Bill is co-author and main writer for the music history book "AMPEG: The Story behind the Sound," which earned the book-of-the-year award from Vintage Guitar magazine in 2000. He has played in several prize-winning blues bands, currently playing bass for A Cup of Blues.

Tortured by traditional arts classes in school, Bill found a growing curiosity and love for modern arts while attending Columbia University and roaming the Big Apple. He is motivated, in semi-retirement, to make collages and multi-media installations; doing photography is a step toward realizing that dream. His photographic specialties are retro: he uses Polaroid, The Impossible Project, and Fuji Instax instant films… along with analog films in a variety of formats.

He is bad about organizing and posting his work but promises to do better.

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A POLAROID AESTHETIC, 4/08

(for the 600 polaroid show--2219 gallery, baltimore, MD)

Not only the moment in time… but the motion of time. Vertical time/ the epiphany and horizontal time/ the history. All that is bound up and found in a mili-second and all that is implied and discovered by time’s passing. Beauty-ugliness/joy-sadness/delight-horror and growth-progress/mutability/decline.

These I attempt to hold and realize in my arts—especially pictures, and pictures of pictures, since the arts organize, offer meanings and beauty, reflect upon the world in the chaos, senselessness, and sometimes meanness of the world. Thus photos reflect upon photos, another layer of artifice and significance.

Polaroids, in particular, can capture the glory, drama, or mystery of the moment—the instant film in its own revelatory process sharing dynamic beauty, passion, or pain after several elapsed moments. Put two or three Polaroids together, juxtaposed over time, and narrative meanings dance in the mind—offering the depth of the thing pictured right then (an iris, a breast, a street) and the motion of that thing in development or decline.

In the end, such pictures can show us our lives and our certain mortality.

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