Looking at my pictures people often ask what the common theme is? What draws my
interest? Everywhere I have been I have seen people building their environment, their
culture and themselves. I have learned to see this everyday endeavor as the art of living, of
being a person, part of a community. People everywhere want to make their lives
beautiful! Everywhere I have been I have also seen this effort undermined by intolerance,
greed, cruelty, oppression and corruption. Sometimes effects of this are obvious and
immediate but sometimes it happens so gradually and cumulatively it is almost invisible,
'just the way things are'. That is how it has been happening in my own country, my own
community and in me. I have learned to recognize the effects of corruption to be war,
extremes of wealth and poverty and the erosion of participation in community. This human
conflict appears to me to be growing around the world, whether in Maine, China, Bosnia or
the valleys of Alsace. We are all swept up in what people are calling globalization.
Traditional ways of life appear to be under attack everywhere in the world. People are less
and less directly involved in creating the things they use or even the way they live.
Everything from the food we eat to the hopes and dreams we learn and our ideas are
consumed passively by us. People's environments and communities are formed more and
more by people far away, not so much for beauty as for profit. I have learned to look for
signs of this human story - people struggling in so many ordinary little ways to live their
lives beautifully, even against the odds. So the answer to people's question, "what sorts of
things do you photograph?" is that I look for signs of this struggle in order to explore the
process of our creation.
interest? Everywhere I have been I have seen people building their environment, their
culture and themselves. I have learned to see this everyday endeavor as the art of living, of
being a person, part of a community. People everywhere want to make their lives
beautiful! Everywhere I have been I have also seen this effort undermined by intolerance,
greed, cruelty, oppression and corruption. Sometimes effects of this are obvious and
immediate but sometimes it happens so gradually and cumulatively it is almost invisible,
'just the way things are'. That is how it has been happening in my own country, my own
community and in me. I have learned to recognize the effects of corruption to be war,
extremes of wealth and poverty and the erosion of participation in community. This human
conflict appears to me to be growing around the world, whether in Maine, China, Bosnia or
the valleys of Alsace. We are all swept up in what people are calling globalization.
Traditional ways of life appear to be under attack everywhere in the world. People are less
and less directly involved in creating the things they use or even the way they live.
Everything from the food we eat to the hopes and dreams we learn and our ideas are
consumed passively by us. People's environments and communities are formed more and
more by people far away, not so much for beauty as for profit. I have learned to look for
signs of this human story - people struggling in so many ordinary little ways to live their
lives beautifully, even against the odds. So the answer to people's question, "what sorts of
things do you photograph?" is that I look for signs of this struggle in order to explore the
process of our creation.
Represented by Getty Images, Editorial Assignments