How it all started .. .

At the end of senior year in high school, the student art show had an ink drawing of the Dorothea Lange photograph known as Peapicker’s Wife. My first thought after seeing the drawing was I can take pictures like that. I began to believe I could take pictures that explain social conditions better than words could. and decided to go to Harlem. After two years and two months photographing New Haven’s ghettos with a Polaroid Swinger and an occasional Asahi Pentax, marriage to a Columbia University graduate student got me to New York City.

1967 Pieces of New Haven and New York City

I moved from New Haven to New York September 1967.  During the summer of '67, I learned how to use a darkroom.  It was in Honolulu Hawaii, I  learned how to develop black and white 35 mm film and make black and white prints.  It was also then and there, I got my first 35 mm camera, an Asahi Pentax.

The closest thing to 6 Flags and Kings Dominion we had growing up was Savin Rock in West Haven.  Games and rides and the brass ring on the flying horses. 

The Beinecke Rare Books Library at Yale University behind a
column.

A young lad in the Dixwell housing complex in New Haven.

Young Puerto Ricans make music on the front porch of a house in the Hill Neighborhood of New Haven.  

New York City children on the West Side

The stately lion gracing the entrance to the New York Public Library at Bryant Park

Time Square as it was in 1967

1966 The Maharajan in Connecticut

Arab culture has been alive in Connecticut since before the beginning of the 20th Century.  I remember an annual festival every September, called a maharajan, celebrated in a large outdoor open space.  There was always plenty of room to line dance and for children to run around.  The lines of people dancing grew to what my childhood memory tells me was a hundred people.    I had been photographing less than a year when I went to this maharajah.  I was 19.  At that time, it became clear cultural events  would often be the focus of my camera lens.  It's fun to watch the music make people dance.