My point of departure for this series was looking back to some overlooked negatives from my regular visits to San Francisco over the years. I felt a mixture of deep yearning to revisit the city - yet being unable to due to CV19 - combined with the final days of the 2020 election campaign. The constant political barrage has caused polarization and divisions with American society at every level, including within my own family. The work uses experimental and synthetic approach to explore some of these themes and is an on-going series.

In 2017-2018 I travelled several states including Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, California and Montana to document as many classic and modern billiards rooms as I could find, ultimately crossing paths with the greatest player of the game -Efren Reyes.

My life-long love affair with movie theaters originated with my first job at United Artists Movie Theater at Eden Prairie Center in the late 1980s. For several years I made serial photographs of the neighborhood theater that I patronize the most - St. Anthony Main Theater. It has been closed for much of 2020 and hopefully the marquee will return with new releases yet again. This theater is also home to the Minneapolis-St Paul Film Society and is beloved by many in the community.

Asmara is the capital city of the NE African country Eritrea.  Asmara has a many-sided geopolitical history. In 1882, Italian colonists began their occupation of Eritrea. Over sixty years they asserted their presence, filling its capital city, Asmara, with superlative art deco architecture and experimental early modernist design.

In the 1940s Italy was replaced by British and then Ethiopian ruling interests. Finally in 1991, after a 30 year war for independence, the modern State of Eritrea slowly transitioned to a normalized state. 

My work is framed by this distressed history, and the urban landscapes upon which this history is impressed. Despite generations of conflict and subjugation, the people of Eritrea that I've come to know remain optimistic and fiercely proud of their survival amid such struggles. Asmara's unique, at times incongruous infrastructure is amazingly well preserved, reflecting the heartfelt hope that I hear from its citizens. In selecting serval photographs from a substantial reservoir, I've attempted to portray both Asmara’s rich past, and it’s uncertain future.

After many visits I developed a mythic belief that at some point there would be only a single living Italian remaining on from 1930’s Asmara, recalling nostalgically better times that everyday recede.  I became determined to discover, and meet this fictional ‘last Italian.’  Census data revealed that of 75,000 Italians tallied in 1939, by 2008, only 900 remained.  Over the course of four visits from 2002-2011, and given my white - outsider status - I was fascinated to come across these generally elderly Italian-Eritreans.  Over the decade as such encounters dwindled, I witnessed a rich cultural affinity among my Eritrean contacts to all things Italian: the language, foods, customs, mannerisms, etc.  Naively assuming Italian-Eritrean relations to be genial, I came to learn about the often negative influences that Italians had on the local population.  Confronted by certain specific atrocities, I abandoned the project, nevertheless, it always retained a hold on my imagination.

Returning to Eritrea in 2012, I was unsuccessful in finding the figure I had so romanticized.  Perhaps he no longer exists, or is hidden behind some closed door, busy in memories of past glory, while my camera has been unable to glimpse him.  Or, he exists as a palimpsest, an erased figure whose traces remain in a wrought iron rail, or a light-strewn foyer.  The current political state has made the likelihood of my own return questionable, and the last Italian in Asmara may pass into oblivion without mine, nor anyone else’s notice.

Beginning in 2006 I became fascinated by the diminishing role of pay telephones in public spaces. The telephone booth has long been a fixture of American culture. Public phones also had an impact on physical spaces and design elements in many buildings such as gas stations and restaurants.  Cinema and television still employ the public phone as a device for moving a story-lines in certain directions.  Before mobile phones, pay-phones also offered a certain degree of privacy and personal space. The advent of the mobile phone has rendered the public pay phone obsolete in most cases, but as I documented the loss, I also became interested in the customizations that each neighborhood had imparted.  Graffiti, vandalism and heartfelt love poems are among the many ways these objects have been transformed into more than a simple telecommunications devices.

My New American West project follows in the enormous shadow of Richard Avedon making 5x7 portraits of people I come to meet as I journey across the same region 30 years later. To be continued in 2018.

Selections from a collaboration with Berlin-based photographer Anke Linz. Double exposures were made on 35mm film between Berlin and Minneapolis.

Cafe scenes.

Found elegies of Prince in the weeks and months since he passed away in 2016.