Biography
I was born and raised in central Louisiana. As a young man my primary motivations were to travel and learn as much as I could about the world. During these formative years I studied in Quebec, Belgium and in Spain for a year. I eventually earned a Ph.D. in Romance Philology from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and began teaching at Clemson University. I retired from teaching in 2006 as Professor Emeritus of Spanish and currently reside in Easley, South Carolina.
Although my academic training was in literature I gradually became interested in the history of photography, and in the early 1980s I began research on the pictorial movement in Spain. This research led to the publication of several books, including The Photographic Impressionists of Spain: A History of the Aesthetics and Technique of Pictorial Photography, New York, 1989: Schmidt de las Heras: Fotografías 1944-1960. La Coruña (Spain), 1999, and El impresionismo fotográfico en España: Una historia de la técnica y de la estética de la fotografía pictorialista, Zarautz (Spain), 2000.
In the early 1970s I became interested in creative photography and since that time have photographed extensively in my home area of North and South Carolina, in other areas of the US, and also in Canada, China, Mexico, Turkey, and Spain. I am primarily a landscape photographer and have used both film and digital capture in my work in several formats, including medium format, large format, and ultra large format equipment.
As a fine art photographer I have been interested primarily in the hand-made photograph and have acquired expertise in several different historical printing processes, including carbon transfer, kallitype, platinum/palladium, and vandyke. Making a photograph by hand, which includes preparing the original sensitized material by coating a sheet of paper with a photographic emulsion, is a fascinating adventure in which one has maximum control over the printmaking syntax that determine the final, tangible qualities of the photograph as an object, including its color, texture, tonal scale and reflective qualities.
For more than two decades I have devoted a great part of my time to hand made processes and my work has been featured in a number of photographic publications, including Photovision, Silvershotz and View Camera. I have conducted many group and one-on-one workshops on carbon printing in the USA and abroad, including China, Canada, Mexico, Spain and Turkey, and have published extensively on alternative printmaking,including web articles on carbon transfer, kallitype, and vandyke, several monographs on alternative printmaking in China, and most recently Carbon Transfer Printing, co-authored with Don Nelson and John Lockhart.
