I’ve had an interest in photography since I was very young. My father had a small darkroom in our house when I was growing up in St. Louis. He used it primarely to develop and print photographs from our many family vacations. When I was old enough, he taught me the very basics of darkroom work, and that was pretty much my only training as a photographer. I never studied it in school.

In high school, I started taking a serious interest in photography. Besides taking pictures, I also started studying other photographers’ styles and techniques. I quickly became obsessed with Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus. Like most new photographers, I started out trying to mimic the styles of my heroes, but I quickly realized that I had my own style and aesthetic to develop. I used my friends as subjects and concentrated on straight portraiture.

In 1985, I moved to Chicago to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Instead of photography, I decided to study film-making instead. I felt I already had achieved my style and technique with photography, so I wanted to study something I did not have technical know-how of. But I quickly realized that I did not have the patience to deal with film-making. I would lose interest in projects after only a few days. Still photography gave me more immediate results so I decided to forgo my cinematic dreams and concentrate on my still images. I still refused to study photography in an academic setting so I just ended up dropping out of art school after two years. I ended up getting a job in a record store instead.

For the next 13 years, I held record store jobs in Chicago. And it was during that time that I shot most of my early classic fetish work. That is all the work that is collected in my first book “The Beauty of Fetish” (Edition Stemmle).

In 1998, I decided I needed a change of scenery and made the decision to move to a new city and most importantly, a new environment. I left the murky gray city of Chicago and headed out to the color-saturated landscape of Southern California. It was there that I made a whole new group of friends and contacts who ultimately helped me forge my new style of photography. My first three years in California produced most of the work found in my newest book, “The Beauty of Fetish: Volume II” (also on Edition Stemmle).

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