With Leigh Ann above North Clear
Creek Falls
near Creede, Colorado
In the San Juan Islands,
Washington state
Where
there are mountains there is Hope
A cubicle-free zone
Note: When I started building this website I
had planned on writing it in the third person, in
the manner of most other standard "professional"
sites. But now that just seems silly... I am the
one building this and I am writing it, so why
should I say "John" or "he" except out of pretense?
So at the risk of using too many I's, here we
go...
I grew up in the wilds of suburban New Jersey, but after 20 some years there I realized that the East Coast wasn't cutting it for me in terms of landscape, climate, and adventure. I moved to southern California in the late 80's and soon spent much of my time exploring or longing to be in the mountains or desert. My first trip to the Eastern Sierra at the foot of Mount Whitney was a transcendent experience I will never forget, coming face to face with overwhelming, monumental nature. Although I had been taking photography fairly seriously since 1986 or so, I didn't really understand what I was doing until I attended the Tri-Community Photo Program in Covina from 1993 to 1997. If you live in LA and care about photography, check it out, it's awesome. This changed my life, and I spent much of my free time in those years taking classes, working in the darkroom, and learning my craft.
But lives change, riots and earthquakes happen, and eventually it becomes time to move on. In 1997 I relocated to the liberal hippie paradise of Boulder, Colorado, where I continued to slave away for my employer, a well-known multi-national corporate giant with three letters in their name. In spite of the beauty of my new town and the Rockies out my back door, my creativity took a dive, sacrificed to the pursuit of career and involuntary overtime. Big mistake. In 2003 I walked away from this death-trap, suicide-rap (thank you, Bruce) and hit the road on an unemployed adventure which lasted much longer than I had planned. How does it feel, to be on your own, with no direction home, like a complete unknown? Well now I know. Life is fascinating and frightening outside of the safe suburban cocoon, though not as frightening as it is inside it. But I digress...
In 2005 I landed safely home at Orient Land Trust in the northern San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. The "Valley of Longing", a friend calls it, and that it is - a vast, mostly empty, almost desolate place that brings you face to face with earth, sky, wind, stars, and your own demons... because there is little else to distract you here. No TV, barely any radio, no bars, few restaurants, just the big dry empty. And it is here where my photography exploded, so to speak, where the creative longing that had been bottled up for years finally came roaring out. The sleeper had awakened, and here, in my natural element, the pieces of my life have begun to assemble themselves.
So this is what you will see here on this evolving website; glimpses and visions and songs of Tierra Sagrada, the sacred chunk of earth on which I now reside. On which we all reside. May we treat her with kindness and treasure each day we are privileged to walk under her endless blue skies.
The Sangre de Cristo range and Cottonwood Peak, elevation 13,588'